ARTE presents its third ARTE Opera season and signals extra support for European arts and culture with the campaign #WeReStillOpen
The European Culture Channel ARTE presented the third edition of its digital opera season at an international press conference that was held virtually on Monday, 2 November 2020 and attended by the directors of four of Europe’s greatest opera houses: Olivier Mantei of the Opéra Comique Paris, Matthias Schulz of the Staatsoper Unter den Linden Berlin, Per Boye Hansen of the Prague State Opera, and Andreas Homoki of Opernhaus Zurich. ARTE at the same time announced the launch of #WeReStillOPen, a campaign aimed at stepping up support for Europe’s arts and culture scene for the duration of the recently re-imposed corona restrictions.
ARTE, in partnership with twenty-one of Europe’s leading opera houses and festivals, has been curating its very own digital opera season since 2018, making at least one outstanding new production freely available online every month. On Monday the channel held a virtual press conference to announce what the current season has in store for us.
Coming up on 14 November is Jean-Philippe Rameau’s opera Hippolyte et Aricie, to be broadcast live from the Opéra Comique in Paris, where the Ensemble Pygmalion will be playing under the baton of Raphaël Pichon – albeit without a live audience. Online viewers also have two new ballets to look forward to in November: the premiere of Mahler/Live, the inaugural choreography of Martin Schläpfer in his new role as director and chief choreographer of the Vienna State Ballet, and Pär Isberg’s staging of Pippi Longstocking, which ARTE Opera broadcast from the Finnish National Opera in March of this year and is now making available once again in honour of the 75th anniversary of the now legendary children's book of that name by Swedish author Astrid Lindgren.
Advent will see two large-scale productions: Andreas Homoki’s staging of Verdi’s Simon Boccanegra from the Opernhaus Zurich, without whose state-of-the-art sound engineering this major work for orchestra and chorus would not have been possible (6 December), and Calixto Bieitos’ interpretation of Wagner’s Lohengrin from the Staatsoper Unter den Linden, whose star-studded cast includes Sonya Yoncheva, René Pape and Roberto Alagna in the lead roles (13 December).
These will be followed in the spring of 2021 by Jiří Nekvasil’s production of Bedřich Smetana’s Dalibor to be broadcast from the Prague State Opera with Jaroslav Kyzlink at the rostrum. Although the season has only just started, it has already chalked up its first major success story. This was the 7 Deaths of Maria Callas, an opera project by world-famous performance artist Marina Abramovic at the Bayerische Staatsoper, which was viewed by 170,000 viewers alone in its first month online.
ARTE Opera – A Season from and for Europe
ARTE Opera has set itself the goal of bringing Europe’s opera scene in all its breadth, variety and quality to new circles of viewers and opera lovers all over the world. The performances from Europe’s leading opera houses are either live-streamed or are freely available as video on demand, most of them worldwide and with subtitles in six languages. Thanks to the financial support of the European Union’s Creative Europe Programme, ARTE can now offer not just German and French subtitles, but also English, Italian, Polish and Spanish. Seventy per cent of European users can therefore enjoy the programme in their native tongue. Many of the operas shown are co-productions between ARTE and its European partner channels, including RTÉ, RTBF, YLE, RTS and ČT. The last two ARTE Opera seasons that ran between September 2018 and September 2020 attracted more than two million views. For more information, please go to arte.tv/opera.
ARTE Opera partners (as per 2 November 2020):
Festival d‘Aix-en-Provence (Aix-en-Provence), Dutch National Opera (Amsterdam), Gran Teatre del Liceu (Barcelona), Staatsoper Unter den Linden (Berlin), Théâtre Royal de la Monnaie (Brussels), Semperoper (Dresden), Hamburg State Opera (Hamburg), Finnish National Opera (Helsinki), Opéra de Lausanne (Lausanne), Royal Opera House (London), Teatro Real (Madrid), Teatro alla Scala (Milan), Bayerische Staatsoper (Munich), Teatro Massimo (Palermo), Opéra Comique de Paris (Paris), Opéra National de Paris (Paris), Czech National Opera (Prague), Opéra National du Rhin (Strasbourg), Wexford Festival Opera (Wexford), Vienna State Opera (Vienna), Opernhaus Zurich (Zurich).
The four directors present at the press conference, Olivier Mantei (Opéra Comique Paris), Matthias Schulz (Staatsoper Unter den Linden Berlin), Per Boye Hansen (Prague State Opera) and Andreas Homoki (Staatsoper Zurich), also talked about the perilous situation that so many cultural institutions are now in.
Wolfgang Bergmann, Managing Director of ARTE Deutschland and ARTE Coordinator for the German TV channel ZDF, announced that during the coming weeks and months, ARTE Concert, ARTE’s cross-genre digital music programme (arte.tv/concert) to which ARTE Opera belongs, will be responding to the latest Europe-wide lockdown by stepping up its support for Europe’s arts and culture scene.
“In the current crisis, ARTE, as the European Culture Channel, believes that now, more than ever, its mission is to support artists, creatives, cultural institutions and event organizers whenever and wherever possible,” explained Bergmann.
Launched in partnership with some of the hardest hit institutions, including theatres, orchestras and other creatives, ARTE’s #WeReStillOpen campaign will endeavour to create a top-notch programme comprising not just live- or rendezvous-streamed events, but also new formats that have yet to be developed. Alongside the ARTE Opera season, ARTE’s pursuit of this goal will entail continuing the popular format Hope@Home, whose motto starting today will be the “Next Generation,” as well as resuming its European DJ-set series UnitedWeStream.
