19 July - 31 August 2024

Recap

With an outstandingly warm audience response and a 98.5 percentage of occupied seats, the 2024 Salzburg Whitsun Festival has drawn to a close. Kammersängerin Cecilia Bartoli, the Artistic Director of the Festival, focused on Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart; she also celebrated the 50-year anniversary of the Salzburg debut of her long-standing artistic friend Plácido Domingo with a gala concert.

“What I particularly love about the Whitsun Festival is that for four days, I can create a little world where we can jointly dedicate ourselves fully to familiar and new works in very different contexts. I myself was surprised how many aspects of Mozart’s oeuvre we ultimately managed to incorporate this year. The lynchpin was our ‘Folle journée’, which was ‘mad’ in every way and dedicated to the ingenious works co-created by Mozart and Da Ponte. In our enthusiasm, we were gripped by a certain mischievousness, certainly appropriate for Mozart, which made us reach for the stars. Here, the ensemble spirit – which was palpable throughout the weekend and the reason I revere and love Mozart from the bottom of my heart – was felt in its best, concentrated form.

Plácido Domingo has had a relationship with the Festival for 50 years. Through his Operalia Competition, he has done amazing things to support young vocalists, and many of its winners are world-famous opera stars today. The artistic friendships that grew from this spirit of shared music-making made the gala a very special event.

And in this same spirit, I would like to thank all those involved – also the wonderful Festival teams and staff! – for their immense contributions! Thank you, of course, to the warm-hearted and interested audience, which keeps inspiring us with its enthusiasm to ever-new flights of excellence,” says the Artistic Director Cecilia Bartoli about this year’s edition of the Salzburg Whitsun Festival.

“With her customary insightful programming, Cecilia Bartoli has managed once again this year to wonderfully convey essential perspectives of Mozart’s oeuvre. For many years, her unerring feeling for musical and dramaturgical quality has made the Whitsun Festival an artistic event of the first rank,” says Artistic Director Markus Hinterhäuser.

“With Tutto Mozart, for the first time, Cecilia Bartoli focused on Salzburg’s resident genius for her Whitsun programme. The audience followed her with great enthusiasm. More than 13.000 visitors and 98.5% of seats occupied mean that the 2024 Whitsun Festival was a worthy successor to the great triumphs of recent years,” thus Festival President Kristina Hammer.

“In business terms, Cecilia Bartoli’s has once again proved a resounding success. The Salzburg Whitsun Festival has proven a true audience magnet, with visitors from more than 50 nations. We thank all the artists involved and the entire Festival team. Together, they made this great success happen,” says Executive Director Lukas Crepaz.