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George Enescu International Festival shortlisted for International Opera Awards 2020
The Bucharest-hosted George Enescu International Music Festival has been nominated for the first time for an International Opera Award 2020 to reflect the increasingly sustained promotion of opera in the festival's events.
According to a press statement released on Friday, the festival is about to support its nomination by presenting to the jury the schedule devoted to opera in its 2019 edition.
Winners are to be announced at a gala to be hosted by the prestigious Sadler's Wells in London on May 4, 2020.
"It is a great honour and joy for the George Enescu International Festival to be recognised as a promoter of opera, all the more so as its broader approach of lyric works, which is due to the artistic directions of Vladimir Jurowski, is already part of a trend set in 2017 and with a modern approach that includes the use of multimedia technologies. The trend will continue, as the schedule of the 2021 edition of the festival will present new works," said Mihai Constantinescu, the general director of the event.
At the opening conference of the 2019 edition of the festival, the artistic director, master Vladimir Jurowski, underscored that the schedule highlighted a preoccupation with the world of opera, presenting a variety of masterpieces, from the greatest opera makers of the Baroque era to the elites of the 20th century music hall.
"I think that opera, more than any other art form, can bring together music and text, sound and vision, the individual and the global, to examine deeply and explore those questions that try and define us all, as artists and as people," says Jurowski.
This tendency to promote opera began in 2017 with an innovative premiere: at the opening of that edition, Vladimir Jurowski and the London Philharmonic Orchestra performed Enescu's "Oedipus" in a concert version, for the first time with live multimedia projections, under the artistic direction of Carmen Lidia Vidu.
At the 2019 edition of the festival there were 14 operas in concert. Four of them were rounded up by multimedia creations and visual architecture by Carmen Lidia Vidu, Nona Ciobanu and Peter Kosir.
In the same category dedicated to festivals promoting opera performances, the Salzburg Festival, Donizetti Opera Festival, Castell de Peralada Festival, Macerata Opera Festival, Opera FestivalO19 (Opera Philadelphia) were also nominated.
Other nominees include Lise Davidson, Sir Bryn Terfel and Kirill Petrenko, all performing at the George Enescu International Festival in 2019, and Romanians Adela Zaharia and George Petean, as well as bassist Rene Pape, who performed in previous editions. "Leonore," a story about love, personal sacrifice and heroism by Ludwig van Beethoven, performed at the festival, has been nominated in the Recording (Complete Opera) category.
Established in 2012, the International Opera Awards is an annual event that celebrates opera from all over the world.