From The Guardian:
"At the performances of Richard Strauss’s opera Elektra in Salzburg this week, the scene in the auditorium was almost as alarming as the murderous psychodrama playing out on stage.
Even with a specially reduced seating capacity, the visual effect produced by 1,000 masked audience members looking on at the city’s music venue Felsenreitschule was an uneasy one, in a world where distancing has become the norm.
Still, there was an air of excitement and gratitude among those in attendance, aware that they were some of the few people to be watching live music anywhere in the world. The massed ranks of the Vienna Philharmonic were packed into the pit, and the striking production by the Polish director Krzysztof Warlikowski involved video projections, a swimming pool on stage and much non-distanced anguish.
The production is the centrepiece of Salzburg’s month-long summer festival sof music and theatre, one of the few major cultural events to go ahead this summer. Events in Salzburg are being seen as a trial balloon for theatres and opera houses across the world, desperate – for both artistic and financial reasons – to find a way to operate in the age of Covid.
But is holding a festival during a pandemic a powerful artistic response to adversity, or reckless folly?
“If sportsmen can play and if planes can fly then there should be a safe way for us to get back on stage,” said Tanja Ariane Baumgartner, the German mezzo-soprano who sang Clytemnestra in Elektra."
Article in Euronews:
https://www.euronews.com/2020/08/02/salzburg-festival-opens-for-its-100th-edition-despite-coronavirus-pandemic
https://www.euronews.com/2020/08/02/salzburg-festival-opens-for-its-100th-edition-despite-coronavirus-pandemic
