Baltic Opera Festival – Gdańsk, Sopot 14th-17th July 2023

Gdańsk, Sopot – 14th-17th July 2023

The Baltic Opera Festival is a new event celebrating opera over four days in the month of July. The festival will take place in one of the largest amphitheatres in Europe, the Opera Leśna in Sopot. It promises to be an exciting few days with the works of Bach, Wagner, Moniuszko and Twardowski being recited. The pinnacle will be the performance of the ‘The Flying Dutchman’ by Richard Wagner. Marek Janowski will be conducting the piece. Janowski is a world renowned Grammy-nominated conductor whose interpretation of Strauss, Wagner and Bruckner have been recognised as the standard of performance of this music. For many years Janowski has not conducted an opera performance yet he makes exceptions for selected exciting opportunities. The main part will be sung by the well known baritone, Andrzej Dobber, and accompanying him will be the German singer Ricarda Merbeth performing the role of Senata. There will be two performances of ‘The Flying Dutchman’ on the 15th and 17th of July in Sopot.

The festival will open with the premier of Karol Szymanowski’s “Loteria na mężów, czyli narzeczony nr 69” (The lottery for husbands, or fiancé 69) which has been made in co-production with the Krakow Opera. This work had its pre-premier in 2007. Szymanowski said he wrote it to have a laugh. It depicts a fictitious place, somewhere in America, where women rob banks to fund their dowries and men are threatened with sentences of marriage for greater and lesser crimes. A new edition will take place, under the baton of Piotr Sułkowski and directed by Marcin Sławiński on the 14th of July in the Baltic Opera in Gdańsk.

On the 16th of July we invite all, big and small, music lovers and those who may be taking their first steps into the world of opera to a family day including a picnic, a movie marathon and workshops. The workshops will include ones about Moniuszko, stories, meetings with masters such as Mariusz Treliński and multiple Emmy Award winner Larry Weinstein. Amongst the films that will be shown will be the Grammy-nominated Halka.

The President of the Republic of Poland, Andrzej Duda, is the honorary patron of the festival and the President of the Federal Republic of Germany, Frank-Walter Steinmeier is a fellow patron. The honorary committee of the festival is made up of the directors of the most prestigious opera houses: Peter Gleb – Metropolitan Opera; Andreas Homoki – Opernhaus Zürich; Bohdan Roščić – Staatsoper Wien; Dominique Meyer – Teatro La Scala

Find tickets: https://balticoperafestival.pl/en/