2025 Salzburg Easter Festival: Online Ticket Sales start on 1 October

The focus is on a new production of »Khovanshchina«, the monumental »folk drama« by Russian composer Modest Mussorgsky, which paints a shockingly topical picture of the Russian political and church elite brutally fighting each other at the expense of the population – it depicts chaotic conditions, turmoil and devastation. Mussorgsky wrote the libretto of this music drama himself in order to depict »the past in the present«. He compiled it from hundreds of fragments of text, including private and state documents from the 17th century and scraps of Church Russian. After about 10 years of work, he died in 1881, leaving the piano score of this vast piece and a few fragments of orchestral score. Most importantly – the ending was missing almost in its entirety.

It was the fragmentary and incomplete nature of what Mussorgsky left behind – especially of the ending – that first drew the fascination of director Simon McBurney. The Salzburg performance will present a version of that ending that tries to stay as close as possible to Mussorgsky’s surviving manuscript sketches before leading into Igor Stravinsky’s early 20th century finale.

The Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra will be conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen, currently Music Director in San Francisco. Born in Finland, he has devoted himself primarily to the symphonic repertoire in recent years, conducting his last staged operas – »Das Rheingold« and »Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny« – at the Finnish National Opera in 2019. His fascination with the Russian repertoire runs through his artistic biography. For example, he worked on the world premiere of Dmitri Shostakovich’s long-lost opera fragment »Orango« in 2011.

The British director Simon McBurney, who is celebrated by audiences and the press, will stage the work. McBurney recently presented his production of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s »The Magic Flute« at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. The theater and fiilm actor (»The Manchurian Candidate«, »Harry Potter«, »Mission Impossible«) has been creating sensational theatre productions since the mid-1980s with »Complicité«, which he co-founded.

The first Orchestral Concert under the direction of Esa-Pekka Salonen features Jean Sibelius, the Finnish national composer par excellence, with his 2nd Symphony. The conductor combines this with his Cello Concerto: »As always, I like to show the solo instument in different rows: of course the concertante aspect is always there, but it does not stay the same: it’s sometimes complety alone, sometimes it’s being looped and sometimes the cello becomes a chamber music partner.« The piece was composed for Yo-Yo Ma, who premiered it with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in 2017. At the Easter Festival, the young Finnish cellist Senja Rummukainen will play the solo part.

The young Norwegian conductor Tabita Berglund makes her Salzburg debut conducting the second Orchestral Concert and, together with the musicians of the local Mozarteum Orchestra, creates an evening of arias and duets from operas such as »Macbeth«, »Andrea Chénier« and »Rusalka«. The singers are Sondra Radvanovsky, SeokJong Baek and Simon Keenlyside. From October 2024, Berglund will be Principal Guest Conductor of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra.

In the first of two concert programs by the Mahler Chamber Orchestra, Gianandrea Noseda conducts music by Edvard Grieg, Peter Tchaikovsky and Dmitri Shostakovich. After Grieg’s famous »Peer Gynt« suite, the programme includes Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto in D major op. 35 with soloist Augustin Hadelich, before the evening ends with Shostakovich’s 9th Symphony. Noseda is currently General Music Director at the Zurich Opera and Chief Conductor of the Washington National Symphony Orchestra

For the first of two Choral Concerts, Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra program Gustav Mahler’s 2nd Symphony, the so-called »Resurrection Symphony«. »It’s a journey that is very unlike any other piece of music – it starts from a dark place and goes through versious side-roads to the finale, where Mahler kind of gives us the keys to understand why we are on this planet,« says the conductor. Salonen last conducted this work in a staged production by Romeo Castellucci at the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence in 2022.

One of Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy’s best-known pieces – the oratorio »Elijah« – is on the program of the second Choral Concert. It tells the story of the prophet Elijah and focuses on the confllict between poly- and monotheism. Maxim Emelyanychev, born in Dzerzhinsk, Russia, in 1988, is considered one of the most exciting conductors of the younger generation. He recently made his debut with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra in Amsterdam, the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra and the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra. The title role will be sung by Andrè Schuen, known to Salzburg audiences from »Così fan tutte« and »Le nozze di Figaro«, for example.