In January 2022, the first insight into our opera was shared in public - an introduction to the artists involved and look at our initial ideas and conversations moving forward.
How can an opera sound, look and be experienced in the 21st century? In the Opera Studio, the Bregenz Festival and the Kunsthaus Bregenz are opening up a space for artists to share ideas, explorations and thoughts that will lead to a premiere on the workshop stage. The audience is invited to accompany this process over several years. After the premieres of To the Lighthouse in 2017 and Wind in 2021, an explorer and a returnee are embarking on a new journey: the Belgian-Irish composer Éna Brennan and the British director and artistic director David Pountney.
As a violinist, composer and graphic designer, Éna Brennan moves between different worlds. After graduating from international school in Brussels, she moved to Dublin, where she studied composition and music and drama. She performs in concerts both as a soloist with violin and electronic sounds and with her ensemble Dowry Strings. Numerous vocal and instrumental ensembles bring her compositions and arrangements to the stage with her and have already taken her to the Elbphilharmonie Hamburg, the Union Chapel London and the Wexford Opera House, among others. Her short opera Rupture, as part of the 20 Shots of Opera at the Irish National Opera, received international attention in 2020.
Together with David Pountney, Éna Brennan is working on a special acoustic-visual music theater for the workshop stage. David Pountney is familiar with the diverse possibilities of this theater space, having created numerous projects and premieres for this space under his directorship of the Bregenz Festival from 2004 to 2014. The British director is known to a large audience for his spectacular productions of The Flying Dutchman , Nabucco , Fidelio, The Magic Flute on the lake stage and the opera The Passenger, which has been performed around the world . Pountney has also made a name for himself as a translator and librettist, having written several opera texts for Peter Maxwell Davies. He will bring this wealth of experience to the work of the opera studio.
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Photography © Bregenzer Festspiele / Anja Köhler