Oldenburg’s new 2025-26 season
Looking back on two thirds of his first season in office, Oldenburg State Theatre’s artistic manager Georg Heckel was full of praise for the openness of Oldenburg’s audiences towards a new administration. This boost of confidence, not necessarily the norm for incoming leadership teams, influenced decisions for the second, 2025/26 season across the theatre’s sections of music theatre (opera, operetta and musical), concerts, ballet, youth theatre, communication (liaison between the theatre and the community, enabling the community to work in and with the theatre in various ways), a section enabling new types of engagement with the form and content of theatre, as well as a project with the association of Low German (dialect) theatre.
For music theatre, the season starts with Verdi’s La traviata, in a production envisioned to emphasise the harsh conditions of life inherent in the plot. This is followed by Massenet’s Werther, conducted by Vito Cristofaro, who takes on the role of acting general music director for the 2025/26 season, while the search for a successor of the current and outgoing general music director, Hendrik Vestmann is still ongoing. The musical Next to Normal follows, with music by Tom Kitt, lyrics by Brian Yorkey. The musical was very successful in the United States, having been nominated for eleven Tony Awards and winning a rare Pulitzer Prize in 2010. Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth of Mtensk continues the focus on twentieth-century work, while for the production of Im weissen Rössl, a musical comedy (‘Singspiel’), a version has been selected that promises to transform this somewhat old-fashioned operetta into a funny and contemporary spectacle.
Head Kapellmeister Eric Staiger conducts Il barbiere di Siviglia by Rossini. The success of Weber’s Der Freischütz in the current season (see review here), with its additional music commissioned for the production from Elena Kats-Chernin and a new version of the libretto by Susanne Felicitas Wolf, may have inspired the next selection: to stage the rarely performed opera Wozzeck by Manfred Gurlitt, with material interspersed from the more well-known opera on the same subject by Alban Berg. Vito Cristofaro conducts. From the current season, the productions of Cabaret, The Cunning Little Vixen and Les contes d’Hoffmann (see review here) are revived.
Daniel Meyer-Dinkgräfe
Photo above: [from l-r] Gesine Geppert (head of Sparte 7 and dramaturg), Petra Bohlen (chair of the association ‘Low German Stage within the Oldenburg State Theatre’), Milena Paulovics (head of directing / artistic management team – theatre), Telse Hahmann (dramaturg for ballet and personal assistant to the head of ballet), Georg Heckel (general artistic manager), Anna Neudert (head dramaturg for music theatre and concerts), Reinar Ortmann (head dramaturg, theatre / artistic management team- theatre), Hanna Puka (head of community engagement), Stefan Schmidt (head of the orchestra), Matthias Grön (head of the youth theatre, dramaturg) © Stephan Walzl