Music plays a key role at the 2024 Festival Weeks in many respects! We are therefore delighted to present two major musical productions in advance, which - in a sadly topical context - deal with anti-Semitism and war as well as with international understanding and reconciliation: Kaddish Requiem "Babyn Jar" and War Requiem.
Kaddish Requiem "Babyn Yar"
In 1941, over 33,000 Jews were murdered by German National Socialists in the Babyn Yar ravine in what is now the Ukrainian capital Kyiv. It is the largest single massacre of the Second World War in Europe. The identity of countless victims is still unknown today. In memory of this, Ukrainian composer Jevhen Stankovych wrote the Kaddish Requiem "Babyn Yar" for narrator, soloists, choir and orchestra, which was premiered at the National Opera in Kyiv in 2016. With the performance of the work at the Wiener Festwochen, the internationally renowned Ukrainian conductor Oksana Lyniv, together with the Kyiv Symphony Orchestra, spans an arc from the past to the present and shows that remembrance is a work on the future.
June 2, 2024, Vienna Konzerthaus
Nikita Chuntomov
War Requiem
Benjamin Britten's composition War Requiem op. 66 is a warning protest for peace and against all forms of inhumanity. First performed in 1962 in memory of the Nazi air raid on Coventry in England, it is still considered one of the most impressive and moving musical works of reconciliation. The compositional structure has been described as an "ingenious inspiration": Latin texts from the Christian Mass for the Dead alternate with poems about "the suffering of war" by the British composer Wilfred Owen, who died two weeks before the end of the First World War. The monumental work for two orchestras, choir and children's choir, vocal soloists and organ can be experienced at the Vienna Festival under the musical direction of Teodor Currentzis.
June 12, 2024, Burgtheater
The two Requiems are available as a subscription at a reduced price of €135.
