including scandalous guest

Easter Festival celebrates Russian Easter in 2025

Easter Festival director Nikolaus Bachler(Bild: L. Dedalus)

Enzo Grimaldo (Jonas Kaufmann) and his lover Laura will soon be sailing off to happiness in the large Festspielhaus thanks to the self-sacrifice of "La Gioconda" (Anna Netrebko). Before that, Oster-Intendant Nikolaus Bachler presented his next edition from April 12 to 21, 2025: it will be Russian at its core when Modest Mussorgsky's political corruption panorama "Khovanshchina" is the staged production.

Esa-Pekka Salonen conducts the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra. A version of the unfinished opera based on Stravinsky's completion is being developed. The production will be directed by Simon McBurney, who should have staged "Khovanshchina" at the Bolshoi in Moscow in 2022.

A colourful orchestral program is arranged around it: Sondra Radvanovsky and Simon Keenlyside can be heard with arias and duets. Salonen plays his own works with the Finns, Sibelius and Mahler's Second Symphony. The Mahler Chamber Orchestra can be heard under Gianandrea Noseda and Maxim Emelyanychev. The Berliner Philharmoniker return in 2026.

Another face that is more infamous than famous will also return to the stage as part of the 2025 Easter Festival: Kammersänger Wolfgang Ablinger-Sperrhacke. The artist has been involved in an ongoing legal dispute with the "big" festival for months. It is about compensation for performances that were canceled in 2020 due to the coronavirus pandemic. So far, all lawsuits against the members of the Board of Directors, some of them personal, have been dismissed.