At the Salzburg Festival, Barrie Kosky's "Hotel Metamorphosis" puts Vivaldi and Ovid in the same bed

Premiered in June at the Whitsun Festival, which has been conducted since 2012 by Italian mezzo-soprano Cecilia Bartoli, Hotel Metamorphosis joins the popular pastiches of 18th ^- century opera. They recycled, in a way, through a new story (often fanciful, even parodic), a sort of playlist drawn from various works belonging to various composers. Vivaldi's pen alone, whose 2025 celebrates the three hundredth anniversary of the publication of The Four Seasons , nevertheless provides the vast majority of the 45 pieces that punctuate a synopsis developed around five myths taken from Ovid's Metamorphoses . The conceptual helm is the talented director Barrie Kosky, the playwright Olaf A. Schmitt and the conductor Gianluca Capuano – not forgetting, although she is not mentioned, the passionaria Cecilia Bartoli, who put the operatic arias of the "Red Priest" back at the center of the discography in 1999 with a pioneering and magnificent Vivaldi Album on Decca.

It is in a luxurious hotel room, in the center of which sits a vast "king size" (which will also serve as a Murphy bed and a tomb), that Barrie Kosky has installed a judicious visual device, the unity of place underlining in some way the Ovidian transformist frenzy. At the heart of the story, the clear, almost childlike voice of the German actress Angela Winkler , whose youthful silhouette, at over 81 years old, gives a kind of timelessness to the story of Orpheus, which is punctuated by four poems by Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926) inspired by these figures of ancient mythology.

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