“Because I really love him Wagner and I am fully aware musicians and stage requirements, I wanted to present his work only when artistic ability our organization will be absolutely ready, and when the conditions are ripe, says “K” its art director National Opera, Giorgos Kumentakis.

Our conversation comes on the occasion of the announcement of the ELS program for the 2023-24 art season, which is worth his signature. In it we read that next March Richard Wagner’s first project in the new ELLS premises will become a reality. “Because our orchestra has been tried in a particularly demanding piece of the repertoire, with a leading player like Philippe Augen, who specialized in Wagner, as well as an excellent co-production with Copenhagen under the excellent direction of John Fuljams, I think now is our best moment. to make big claims to the great composer,” Mr. Kumentakis comments in response to a question about his decision to include Valkyrie, a work that will actually be presented for the first time in the organization’s 84-year history.

Then Richard Wagner, as well as Bertolt Brecht – Kurt Weill in the political opera The Rise and Fall of the Mahogany City. How did you decide on such a composition? “It is very interesting that in our season two such great creators coexist, about whose work one could say that they are in dialogue only because of their contrasts,” Mr. Kumentakis replies. “Wagner envisioned art that immerses the viewer/listener in an almost hypnotic integration of drama, music and visual performance, while Brecht, by contrast, always prioritized the awakening of society through a strict staging of these elements and an emphasis in the Marxist theory of class struggle.”

The direction is taken by Giannis Huvardas, already tested in Janáček’s The Makropoulos Affair in 2018, who returns to ELLS with a new production of contemporary opera. The satirical work was staged in Leipzig in 1930, but a few years later was banned by the Nazis and tells of “the golden city of our dreams, turning to dust and disappearing before our eyes.”

We are also looking forward to the continuation of The Artist on the Composer, an art installation created in collaboration with NEON. After Nikos Naouridis and Giorgos Lanthimos, the third production was entrusted to artist Ioanna Pantazopoulou and will be presented in September. New generation Greek artist living and working in New York. She creates ephemeral sculptural monuments from unusual materials that tell a story, and her work follows the principles of architecture without falling into their trap.

Both the new production of “The Artist about the Composer” and the opera “Eclairs”, the third work by the award-winning French composer Philippe Hersan to a libretto by the famous French writer Jean Esnault, based on the fictional biography of Nikola Tesla, the ELLS artistic director’s desire for a broad, multi-collective program, based on the Greek strengths, but at the same time facing the international world of opera with a strong extroversion. Les Éclairs is a musical journey through the Industrial Revolution in New York City, chronicling the hectic life of Serbian-born cosmopolitan dandy and pioneering scientist Tesla.

Finally, events dedicated to the memory of Maria Callas will end next semester, “without being afraid of her legend, but drawing strength and inspiration from her,” says Mr. Kumentakis: Herodeion Opera Gala (16/9), exhibition “Unpacking Kallas” on 26/11 and showing a new documentary about the diva’s Greek period on December 2, her birthday.