The Man Who Gives Form to the Sprawling Salzburg Festival

SALZBURG, Austria — Speaking to reporters about the Salzburg Festival’s new production of Monteverdi’s “L’Incoronazione di Poppea,” one of its stars, mezzo-soprano Kate Lindsey, described the “incredible freedom” this prestigious festival provided the staging. Young dancers, Lindsey said, were “the heart of the show.”

“They worked intensively for three weeks before we showed up,” she added. “And we all warmed up together before every rehearsal. We don’t get that in many productions, if ever.”

Festivals provide a break from the routines that opera companies and orchestras contend with during the regular season. Salzburg has a budget of more than $72 million to support just six weeks of programming, which allows daring from its director, the pianist and impresario Markus Hinterhäuser, who took over last summer.

Asked to describe his job in an interview at his office here, Hinterhäuser emphasized that since the festival’s efficient operational structure needs little of his help, he can focus on “what we present, how we present it, and the kind of static we create.”

“Art isn’t art without form,” he added. Giving the festival form is his mission.

But form at Salzburg can take different, well, forms. Hinterhäuser’s taste seems to hark back to the tumultuous 1990s tenure of the impresario Gerard Mortier, who arrived with an agenda: to jolt a festival that, to his mind, had grown elitist and stultified during the long reign of the conductor Herbert von Karajan. Mortier presented in-your-face productions of staples like “Così Fan Tutte” and “Die Fledermaus,” commissioned a raft of new works, brought in guest orchestras to nudge the Vienna Philharmonic from its place of primacy and oversaw extensive programs of contemporary music.

Of course, there are givens at Salzburg that no director dares tamper with, like accommodating star performers. Plácido Domingo, a regular, chose this summer’s festival to introduce his 150th role: Zurga, in a concert performance of Bizet’s “The Pearl Fishers.” But Hinterhäuser is keen on encouraging artists to think beyond tradition.

“A musical score is not written in stone,” he said. Every performance should be a “re-look,” an interpretation. Re-examining repertory in the context of the “now and today,” as he put it, is central.

Hinterhäuser pointed to Lydia Steier, whose production of Mozart’s “The Magic Flute,” inspired by the film “The Princess Bride,” framed the opera as a bedtime story told by the crinkle-eyed grandfather of a Viennese family just before World War I; his three young grandsons become, in their imaginations, Mozart’s three boys.

Steier was offering audiences an “interpretation,” Hinterhäuser said, and asking them simply to come along with her for a few hours as she retold the work. Hinterhäuser intends to revive the production, with some staging tweaks, in 2020. He considers Romeo Castellucci’s production of Richard Strauss’ “Salome” to be the most “radical” of this summer’s offerings, because the director dared to probe the murky psychological depths of this still-disturbing opera — even when the resulting stage imagery, however mesmerizing, was baffling.

Hinterhäuser’s most provocative comments, though, concerned the role of commissions. You would expect a daring artist to be eager to present new works. But he said that citing the number of premieres as “proof of artistic vision and daring” can be “a little bit too easy,” even “superficial.” He said it’s just as important, and maybe even more so, to reconsider slightly earlier works — especially, it would seem by his choices so far, a generation of composers active in the second half of the 20th century, like Claude Vivier, Giacinto Scelsi, Galina Ustvolskaya and Gérard Grisey.

Last summer Hinterhäuser made Aribert Reimann’s 1978 “Lear” a centerpiece, and this summer he chose for a major revival Hans Werner Henze’s “The Bassarids,” a retelling of Euripides’ “The Bacchae” with a libretto by W.H. Auden and Chester Kallman, and a fitting choice for Salzburg: The work had its premiere there in 1966.

I was able to attend a dress rehearsal, and I can report that the modern-dress production by Krzysztof Warlikowski — with a set of segmented public and private rooms spanning the vast length of the stage of the Felsenreitschule — and the searing performance Kent Nagano drew from the Vienna Philharmonic and an inspired cast made a compelling case for this seldom-produced work.

In some ways “The Bassarids,” a parable about the conflict between passion and reason, seemed very much of its time, an attempt by a German composer (then in his late 30s) to translate into opera the sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll era of the 1960s. Yet Henze’s score, written when European contemporary music was dominated by complex atonal styles, stands out for the skillful way he melds modernist elements with vestiges of Mahler and Strauss. For all its rigor and layered intricacies, the music is rapturous. And I did feel like I was attending a premiere of sorts; I hope the festival releases a video or recording.

Commissions will come, Hinterhäuser promised. He acknowledged in the interview that the premiere of Thomas Adès’ “The Exterminating Angel” at Salzburg in 2016 was a milestone of the festival’s recent history. (The Metropolitan Opera, one of the work’s commissioners, presented it last year, to acclaim.)

But for now, a top priority is giving “shelter,” as he put it, to the festival’s many chamber music and small orchestra concerts, which he said should be more “at the epicenter” of Salzburg. On my final night, I attended a bracing concert in the main festival hall featuring the pianist Yuja Wang and the Percussive Planet Ensemble, a popular group directed by the virtuoso percussionist Martin Grubinger, a Salzburg native. The program opened with a quasi-improvised, 50-minute piece called “Rituals,” in which the ensemble riffed on Stravinsky themes, including from “The Rite of Spring.”

Then, after paying three Ligeti études (to scintillating effect), Wang joined Grubinger and three members of the ensemble in a dazzling arrangement of Bartok’s Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion. There was one jarring note to the event: All 16 players in the percussion ensemble were men. Given the Vienna Philharmonic’s sorry past as a male-only orchestra, you might think a young group being presented at Salzburg — and the festival itself — would be concerned about the message it was sending.

Still, the concert was a wild success. The cheering audience demanded encores and the performers complied until things finally broke up — at this festival of incredible freedom — close to midnight.