Today, Thursday, July 31, the second Munich Opera Festival under the artistic direction of Kent Nagano came to an end with Richard Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. Between June 26 and July 31, a total of 65 events took place, among them 19 different operas and two ballet productions, several song recitals, symphony and chamber music concerts and a series of visual concerts in the Pinakothek der Moderne. Attendance figures reached 98.2% of capacity. Box office receipts were considerably higher than the previous year. Some 80,000 people purchased tickets for the performances, in addition to which large audiences attended the three free admission events in the Opera for All series and the HVB Festival Night.

For the first time in many years, the Munich Opera Festival was again able to present three new productions at the principal performance venues: Mozart’s Idomeneo in the reopened Cuvilliés-Theater, the first Munich performance of Busoni’s Doktor Faust in the Nationaltheater and Richard Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos in the Prinzregententheater. The performances of this work were at the focal point of a series of evenings devoted to the music of Richard Strauss during the final third of the festival. Kent Nagano himself was on the podium of the Bavarian State Orchestra on 15 Festival evenings.

The new concept for Festspiel+ was extremely well-received. It featured art installations by Julian Göthe in the Nationaltheater and the Pinakothek der Moderne, where a series of visual concerts presented in collaboration with the IRCAM in Paris also took place.

31/07/2008