Scenic miniatures of happiness

The "Art from Time" Program Division Enriches the Bregenz Festival The Bregenz Festival repeatedly makes headlines with its spectacular lake production. In 2005, 173,000 spectators saw Verdi's "The Troubadour" in the fiery red oil refinery. This year's production of Claude Debussy's "The Fall of the House of Usher" in the Festspielhaus also received much international attention from audiences and the press. In addition, the festival is increasingly making a name for itself with its third program line: "Art from Time" ("KAZ"), in which young and cheeky music and theater projects are brought to Lake Constance. Freaky, unconventional and eager for discovery is the small but fine program line. The 400,000 euro program budget is financed - true to the motto "art finances art" - from surpluses of the Seebühnen production. What is happiness? What is unhappiness? And how do people deal with it in their search for human closeness? The play "Nico and the Navigators" from Berlin does not deliver grandiose stories, but scenic miniatures. They are thinking spaces on the subject of happiness. The live music for the search for clues comes from the Tyrolean music formation "Franui". They have used Schubert songs as a template and developed them further for the poetic theater evening. Political-temporal-historical thinking spaces The world premiere of "Radek" at the Bregenz Festival, on the other hand, opens up political and contemporary spaces for thought. The chamber opera traces the life of the Jewish Galician Karl Radek. He sympathized with Lenin and Stalin - and died in a Siberian prison camp after a show trial. Another Bregenz production in the context of "Kunst aus der Zeit" also confronts war, destruction and death: Friedrich Cerha's opus magnum "Spiegel I-VII," premiered in 1971. Cerha's most consistent work in the field of sound surface composition is, however, a response to the serial music of the 1960s - a challenge for the SWR Symphony Orchestra Baden-Baden and Freiburg as well as the conductor. A contrasting program comes from the Bregenz Kunsthaus: here electronics meets a string ensemble. "SPIN" is the title of the evening that the Viennese composer Hannes Löschl has created with the Vorarlberg "Ensemble Plus". In addition, Hamburg's Thalia Theater makes a guest appearance in Bregenz with Werner Schwab's garish linguistic classic "Die Präsidentinnen". The first of Schwab's so-called fecal dramas will be added to the Hamburg repertoire in the fall, and Bregenz will show the premiere. "Kunst aus der Zeit" provides an artistic bridge between old and young, between tradition and avant-garde. For many, it is still an insider tip at the festival, but with potential for expansion.

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