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A festival for the family.
Opera productions and concerts of the Vienna Festival in the heart of Vienna.
Our festival in Vienna offers you an unforgettable musical experience!
VIENNA OPERA FESTIVAL
The Wiener Festspiele / Vienna Opera Festival was founded in Vienna in the summer of 2019. The Wiener Festspiele is an opera festival with a focus on classical and romantic operas. The season runs from mid-July to the end of August every year. Venues are the Mozarthaus Vienna, Palais Pálffy, MuTh (concert hall of the Vienna Boys’ Choir) and Musikverein Vienna. The director of the festival is Jesus Leon and the music director is Toby Purser. The festival has its own orchestra, the Vienna Festival Orchestra.
Our Founder and General Director of the Vienna Opera Festival is from Hermosillo, Mexico. He studied in the United States at the UCLA Opera Studio, the Boston Opera Institute and was a member of the Domingo-Thornton Young Artist Program at Los Angeles Opera. In Italy he studied at the Solti Accademia di bel Canto, and for two years under the guidance of the soprano Mirella Freni at her Modena Academy with a Nicolai Ghiaurov scholarship. He specializes in bel canto roles and has sung the lead tenor roles at Deutsche Oper Berlin, Staatstheater Stuttgart, Opéra de Nice, Opera de Toulon, Opera Comique, Maggio Musicale Florentine in Florence, Teatro Massimo Bellini in Catania, Opera di Firenze, Teatro Regio in Parma, Teatro Luciano Pavarotti in Modena, Korea National Opera Seoul, Daegu Opera House, Theatre du Châtelet, Scottish Opera, Garsington Opera, Florida Grand Opera, Atlanta Opera and has just returned from singing Alfredo at Minnesota Opera. He currently lives in Vienna.
Winning universal critical praise, Toby Purser’s work this season was nominated for an Olivier Award and an International Opera Award. Appointed Music Director of New Sussex Opera last year, he has recently worked with companies including English National Opera (also as holder of an ENO Mackerras Conducting Fellowship), Lyric Opera Ireland, Grange Park Opera, Opéra National de Paris, and Opera della Luna. For ENO he conducted Turn of the Screw, The Marriage of Figaro and La Traviata, and was Assistant Conductor on Lulu, the world premiere of Ryan Wigglesworth’s Winter’s Tale, and Julian Anderson’s Thebans. He was Assistant Conductor at the Opèra National de Paris on Eugene Onegin, and on Tristan und Isolde at Longborough Festival. He is conductor of the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra on Jesús León’s CD Bel Canto.
Karin Hofer is a classically trained Italian pianist, piano pedagogue and opera chorus singer with German as her mother tongue and Italian as a second language. At the Wiener Festspiele she holds a leading position in Communication and Performing Arts Management.
She has worked at the Salzburger Festspiele, Easter and Whitsun Festival in the Festspielhaus in Baden-Baden (D), Oper im Steinbruch St. Margarethen, Bregenzer Festspiele, Tiroler Landestheater Innsbruck, Grand Theater de Luxembourg, Theater an der Wien, Wiener Konzerthaus, Musikverein Wien, Berliner Philharmonie, deSingel Antwerpen, Laeiszhalle Hamburg, Styriarte and in the Gustav Mahler Choir of the Vienna State Opera.
In addition to her artistic studies of piano, singing and music pedagogy at the University of Music and Performing Arts in Vienna, as well as Italian at the University of Vienna, she acquired her third bilingual (English, Italian) Master’s degree in Performing Arts Management at the Accademia Teatro alla Scala di Milano in June 2020. In autumn 2021 she also completed the academical specialication for Music Theater Mediation at the Mozarteum Salzburg, the Komische Oper Berlin and the Staatsoper Unter den Linden in Berlin with honors.
On graduating from the University of London with a BA (Hons) in Classics and later an MA in the History of Art from SOAS, Lucy’s early career was in public relations. In 2011 after living in Thailand and Vienna and keen to share her love of opera she founded Divas & Scholars in London, an opera events company offering a programme of recitals, lectures and master classes. She has collaborated with conservatoires, opera studios and opera festivals on a variety of projects, promoting both emerging talent and established singers, new productions and recordings. A choral singer herself, Lucy has a deep interest in the art of the opera singer and a passion for beautiful voices. She is developing a series of documentaries on the architecture and history of opera houses – Temples of Opera – which she is writing and presenting. Lucy joins the Vienna Opera Festival as Events Director.
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