Die Soldaten

Bernd Alois Zimmermann DIE SOLDATEN Alfred Muff Laura Aikin Tanja Ariane Baumgartner Cornelia Kallisch Gabriela Beňačková Ingo Metzmacher Wiener Philharmoniker Bernd Alois Zimmermann Bernd Alois Zimmermann’s opera Die Soldaten (The Soldiers), the “highlight of the festival season” (Süddeutsche Zeitung), breaks all DIE SOLDATEN records! The style and structure of an opera, acknowledged as one of the 20th century’s key works, its musical and dramatic collage technique take it to the limits of what is playable. Now, in Salzburg’s Conductor Ingo Metzmacher Felsenreitschule, the opera has found the ideal performance Orchestra Wiener Philharmoniker venue and, with the Vienna Philharmonic under Ingo Metzmacher together with a top-flight cast of singers, its ideal performers too. Wesener Alfred Muff Marie Laura Aikin Everything in this production is on a massive scale: 170 musicians Charlotte Tanja Ariane Baumgartner (around 50 of them in the side galleries) and 50 or so soloists on Wesener’s old mother Cornelia Kallisch stage contribute to make this highly complex composition a direct Stolzius Tomasz Konieczny and physically palpable experience for the audience. The sheer force Stolzius’s mother Renée Morloc of the music and its performance are reflected in the Latvian-born Countess de la Roche Gabriela Beňačková director Alvis Hermanis’s staging: setting the scene on a 40-metre The Young Count, her son Matthias Klink wide stage in the riding school and taking advantage of the room’s Obrist, Count of Spannheim Reinhard Mayr full height, he portrays the individual episodes and stages of the Desportes Daniel Brenna plot in the simultaneity required by Zimmermann and condenses Pirzel Wolfgang Ablinger-Sperrhacke it into an exciting drama. Based on the play written by Reinhold Eisenhardt Boaz Daniel Jakob Michael Lenz in 1776, and first performed in 1965, the work et al. is moved to the period of the First World War: the innocent young Marie is engaged to be married to the cloth dealer Stolzius, but is seduced by an officer, Desportes, who then abandons her to a Staged by Alvis Hermanis cruel fate as a social outcast. Zimmermann reveals characters to Video Director Hannes Rossacher us “just as we can meet them any time and anywhere, people who Length approx. 120' through no fault of their own can be destroyed.” The critics have seldom agreed to such a degree: the soloists, Shot in HDTV 1080 the orchestra, conductor, director, scenery and the standard of Cat. no. A04001578 singing were all sensational. There was frenetic applause for all those involved at the end and a standing ovation for a “twentieth- A co-production of UNITEL and ZDF/3sat century masterpiece in a highly accomplished twenty-first-century in cooperation with Wiener Philharmoniker, interpretation” (Die Welt) – a triumphant success for a landmark of Salzburg Festival and CLASSICA a century! folder: luebbeke.com WORLD SALES: C Major Entertainment +49-(0)3030306464 All rights reserved · credits not contractual · Different territories [email protected] www.unitelclassica.com Photos: © Ruth Walz.

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