Hotel Metamorphosis: Vivaldi's masterpiece inspires in Salzburg!

Hotel Metamorphosis: Vivaldi's masterpiece inspires in Salzburg!

Salzburg, Österreich - What is currently being performed in Salzburg? At the Salzburg Pentecost Festival, the musical play "Hotel Metamorphosis" is premiered under the direction of Barrie Kosky. The staging, which celebrated its premiere on June 11, 2025, has a playing time of four hours and almost exclusively uses Antonio Vivaldi's music. The director uses the timeless stories from Ovid's "metamorphoses", who have shaped culture for over 2000 years and inspire artistic processing, such as Welt reports.

The stage design of the minimalist hotel room, designed by Michael Levine, forms the central location of the plot. A real land of milk and honey in which stories of transformations are told: from Pygmalion, Arachne, Myrrha, Echo to Narcissus. Gianluca Capuano conducts the ensemble Les Musiciens du Prince-Monaco and ensures the sound framework of this special performance. The musical structure is a modern pasticcio in which Vivaldi's melodies merge with Ovid's stories.

emotions and transformations

Not only the music pulls the listeners: at the inside of their spell. The singing line shines with top -class artists: Cecilia Bartoli, Varduhi Abrahamyan, Lea Desandre and Philippe Jaroussky shine in their roles. Angela Winkler as Orpheus not only brings in her acting performance, but also performs texts by Ovid and Rilke, which illustrate the deep human emotions. The performance is described as an intelligent and sensible experience that the audience rewarded with long-lasting applause, and as Salzburg Festival, the staging is repeated in summer 2025.

The festival also focuses on the city of Venice this year, which adds another dimension for the work of Barrie Kosky, as it reflects the connection between text and music. Kosky himself describes the goal of his work as the creation of a work in which both elements resonate and fertilize each other. The interweaving of Vivaldi's music and ovid's stories creates a captivating performance that takes the audience on an emotional journey.

a festival for the senses

The special relationship between man, nature, gods and animals, as being treated in Ovid's stories, is reflected in the metamorphoses that are processed in this staging. The visitors: So inside can look forward to an extraordinary experience. As reports Opera Online, this happens in a contemporary pasticcio that revives the heyday of this genus in the first half of the 18th century.

The idea of ​​"Hotel Metamorphosis" will not only be a highlight of this year's Pentecost festival, but also an important part of the artistic development under Cecilia Bartoli, which has been the artistic director of the festival since 2012. Kosky will also return in 2026 to create a new staging for Cecilia's 60th birthday. So we look forward to a profound, emotional and visual experience that brings the metamorphoses closer to us in a new way.