Hungarian State Opera announces 2016/17 Hungarian season

The Hungarian State Opera is again offering more than 2000 programmes in the new season. The Hungarian Season will feature pieces by countless major Hungarian composers, choreographers and directors, while over the course of a few weeks, the May Festival will showcase two centuries of Hungarian opera history, from József Ruzitska to Levente Gyöngyösi. In addition to the 28 opera and ballet premieres being added to the enormous classical repertoire, the season will also include a steady stream of musicals, grand operettas, concerts, talk programmes as well as interactive family and children’s programmes.

PREMIERES

On the penultimate weekend of September 2016, as the summer break comes to a close, life will return to the Opera House and the Erkel Theatre. At the Erkel, fans of contemporary dance will be rewarded with Johan Inger’s choreography Rain Dogs, while the Opera House, as in previous years, will be opening its doors in the context of a grand season opener: following the usual open-air commedia dell’arte chamber operas, Ferenc Anger’s new production of La traviata, with Erika Miklósa and Polina Pasztircsák in the principle roles, will move into the palace of opera on Andrássy Avenue after being given its summer pre-premiere on Margaret Island.

To put it all into numbers: with 28 brand-new productions (including six world and six Hungarian premieres), there will be a total of 450 full-scale performances comprising an additional 60 repertoire pieces, 100 concerts, chamber performances and gala, event and festival productions, 200 children’s programmes, 600 building tours, and more than 1,000 ambassadorial presentations. All in all, the 800,000-strong audience can look forward to more than 2,500 attractions taking place in some 20 different venues in the 2016/17 season.

The public will be seeing many of the premieres for the first time: Poulenc’s Dialogues des Carmélites and the ballet Le Corsaire, choreographed to music by Adam, have never been listed on the Opera programme. In 2017, we willl be giving the Hungarian audience their first look at Péter Eötvös’s opera Love and Other Demons. The string of world premieres include unique productions such as Love, inspired by the Károly Makk film, A Streetcar Named Desire set to music by László Dés, a practically unknown opera fragment by Mozart, as well as a composition by Rautavaara – The Mine – that has never before been performed on any of the world’s opera stages.

The extraordinarily broad offering of operas again includes a few popular pieces that are being renewed: The Spinning Room, Lucia di Lammermoor and Bánk bán will all be mounted in productions stamped with the names of directors Michał Znaniecki, Máté Szabó and Attila Vidnyánszky, while Géza M. Tóth continues to direct the Ring cycle with Siegfried.

For the complete list of premieres CLICK HERE.

INTERNATIONAL STARS

Throughout the course of the season, a number of world stars will arrive in Hungary for solo recitals, including Edita Gruberová and Renée Fleming, as well as René Pape, one of the world’s most soughtafter basses, who will be appearing in this country for the first time with a recital of arias on the stage of the Opera House. Returning to sing opera arias for the centenary of the birth of legendary Hungarian tenor József Simándy will be star tenor Jonas Kaufmann, who this time will be making his debut on the stage of the Erkel. The ranks of our internationally renowned artists also include our Hungarian luminaries Andrea Rost, Erika Miklósa, Ildikó Komlósi, Csilla Boross, Levente Molnár and Gábor Bretz, who will be appearing in countless roles.