Passion – Salzburg Festival 2026 - Passion - Salzburger Festspiele 2026

Description

Concert version
Featuring Sarah Aristidou (Lei) and Georg Nigl (Lui), alongside the vocal ensemble Schola Heidelberg, comprising Einat Aronstein (soprano), Coco Lau (soprano), Julie Catherine (alto), Daniel Tepper (tenor), Luciano Lodi (bass), and Matthias Horn (bass), prepared by Ekkehard Windrich.

The 2026 Salzburg Festival is dedicated to themes of interiority, time, memory, guilt, reconciliation, and the power of the heart; its program explores the boundaries between self and other, reason and emotion, and the inner and outer worlds.

The Salzburg Festival presents Pascal Dusapin’s Passion, an intense work of music theater that is at once stripped-back and impassioned. Premiered in 2008 and performed here in a concert version at Salzburg’s Kollegienkirche under the baton of Franck Ollu (who previously conducted it at La Monnaie in 2012), the work unfolds a soundscape where tension remains almost motionless – held, as it were, within a continuous breath – while desire, pain, fear, and romantic longing clash within this apparent restraint.

The work draws loosely on the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, yet Dusapin shifts its contours to offer something far more than a mere retelling. The two protagonists, Lei (Sarah Aristidou) and Lui (Georg Nigl), are not simply transposed mythological figures; they become the faces of a relationship in constant flux, a couple torn between the opposing forces of drawing together and drifting apart. The piece is structured as a sequence of ten interconnected sections – an unbroken dramatic flow in which emotion unfolds in successive movements, never quite reaching resolution. Pascal Dusapin’s music, subtly infused with echoes of Monteverdi and the Baroque world, nonetheless breaks away to assert a distinctive voice. It seeks not grandiosity, but a form of almost spiritual concentration. In Salzburg, this Passion promises the quality of a dramatic meditation – a work where the spoken word seems constantly poised on the edge of silence, set within a structure of refined timbres, internal tensions, and austere beauty.

Further information is available on the Festival’s official website.