Outdoor performance at Austria’s Salzburg Festival.
In Tuesday’s (9/2) New York Times, Javier C. Hernández writes, “It was a typical August evening at the Salzburg Festival, which every summer becomes the center of the classical music world, cramming more than 200 opera, concert and theater performances—roughly the equivalent of Carnegie Hall’s entire season—into six weeks. It is a mammoth undertaking that involves about 3,500 artists; 1,000 staff members; 16 stages; and a budget of 75 million euros (about $88 million). This summer alone, there were six staged operas and four plays, featuring more than 1,500 costumes, including leopard-print hats and glittering Swarovski-covered masks…. No summer festival is quite like the one in Salzburg, a city of around 150,000 at the foot of the Austrian Alps that was the birthplace of Mozart … Here, the offerings are rich and abundant—Mozart symphonies at 10 a.m., vocal recitals at 10 p.m.—drawing more than 256,000 visitors from around the world … The renowned Vienna Philharmonic is the house band, performing concerts and playing in the pit for operas (the orchestra appeared in Salzburg 29 times this summer)…. On a single day in August … Daniel Barenboim, Riccardo Muti and Esa-Pekka Salonen … were in town, conducting Beethoven, Bruckner and Schoenberg.”
