December 15th
Utopia Will Take Part in the Salzburg Festival in the Summer of 2023
The orchestra and choir conducted by Teodor Currentzis will perform Mozart’s Große Messe c-Moll and Purcell’s opera The Indian Queen
The Salzburg Festival has announced its 2023 season programme. The Utopia Orchestra and Choir, an international collective created this year by Teodor Currentzis uniting musicians from 30 countries of the world, will take part in the festival for the first time.
On July 31 and August 2, the musicians will present a concert performance of the semi-opera The Indian Queen in the author’s version by Peter Sellars and Teodor Currentzis. While working on its stage production at the Teatro Real in 2013, Sellars and Currentzis radically updated Purcell’s last work, which remained unfinished, by re-writing the libretto and supplementing the score with fragments from other works of the composer. In the new libretto, vocal performances alternate with excerpts from the novel The Lost Chronicles of Terra Firma by the modern Nicaraguan writer Rosario Aguilar. At the same time, the original music of the opera is complemented by church hymns and secular songs by Purcell.
Teodor Currentzis:
— We have decided that many of Purcell’s masterpieces which have never been performed on stage could find their place in this opera. As they were isolated from the listener and were filed away in the catalogues for academic research, the energy did not penetrate into them. In this opera, they have become the focus of the drama. We ended up with the opera that lasts for about four hours. Four hours of the most powerful emotions.
Peter Sellars:
— The Indian Queen is a strange, broken, painful masterpiece. We used the music that Purcell wrote for the theatre and for the church, connected it with the details of the opera’s plot and with the text of Aguilar’s novel. The result was a feminist version of the conquest of Mexico. Shocking, intimate, and personal.
The leading parts in the opera will be performed by Jeanine De Bique, Julian Prégardien, Rachel Redmond, Jarrett Ott, Andrey Nemzer and Amira Casar.
On August 7 and 8 Utopia and Teodor Currentzis will present their interpretation of Mozart’s Große Messe c-moll. This large-scale musical work is intended for an appropriately large-scale orchestra composition: two sopranos (Nadezhda Pavlova and Rachel Redmond), tenor (Mingjie Lei), bass (Matthias Winckhler), double chorus and a large orchestra.