25. april 2023
Copenhagen Opera Festival and ATHELAS Sinfonietta Copenhagen enter into a strategic partnership. This means that audiences will be able to experience ATHELAS and Copenhagen Opera Festival in joint productions from August 2024 and onwards until 2026.
The Copenhagen Opera Festival has established itself as a spearhead in booking and presenting new national and international spectacular operas. ATHELAS Sinfonietta is a national ensemble with a special commitment to presenting new compositional music at the highest level and to engage in cross-aesthetic scenic productions. The partnership will strengthen the shared ambition and ensure that audiences have the opportunity to experience new opera that both pushes the boundaries of what new opera can and should be, and at the same time is presented at the highest artistic level.
The strategic partnership gives Copenhagen Opera Festival and ATHELAS the opportunity to work long-term for the next 4-5 years to present new boundary-seeking opera productions, where the partners' respective production capacity, network and creative potential are gradually strengthened as the partners commit to sharing networks and bringing joint creative and musical competencies into play in the different development processes, when this makes sense. Overall, it will also significantly professionalize the work process.
The partnership also implies a joint commitment by Copenhagen Opera Festival and ATHELAS to working towards more sustainable productions that are created with both diversity and audience development in mind.
The purpose of the partnership is to contribute to the creation and performance of Danish new opera productions at the highest artistic level and to ensure that international new opera productions can be presented at the highest artistic level in Denmark.
Copenhagen Opera Festival and ATHELAS Sinfonietta have successfully collaborated on major artistic productions in the past. In 2022 alone, the collaboration resulted in two significant opera performances: Lisbon Floor composed by Matias Vestergaard and directed by Natascha Metherell at the Royal Danish Theatre, Takkelloftet and the opera Den Sidste Olie (the Last Rites) composed by Niels Rønsholdt and directed by Louise Beck from OPE-N, which was performed at Østerbro Ice Rink. The strategic partnership thus builds on the fruitful cooperation of previous years.
The partnership will enter into force from September 2023. The first joint productions will be presented during the Copenhagen Opera Festival August 16-25, 2024.
