Every year, young singers studying at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater present themselves at the four-day “GasangsArt” festival with songs and arias from opera and oratorio. “Fly agaric and other plants” is the motto of the first evening, during which trees and various flowers are sung about, from Handel (including “Ombra mai fu”) to Strauss (op. 22). The following day it is about all kinds of celestial bodies between Venus, the sun and the moon, which often occurs in the romantic song. The penultimate evening is then dedicated to the animals: butterflies, spiders and woodlice, but also sheep, tigers and crocodiles in settings of Bach and Mozart, Brahms and Wolf to Dessau, Iván Eröd and Johann Simon Kreuzpointner. In the end, the (opera) journey leads to various real and unreal places, but also to one’s own soul: to Arcadia (Offenbach) and Italy (Wolf) as well as to various magic islands.
Singing Art, 23.-26. Jan. (7 p.m. each day), University of Music and Theater, Arcisstr. 12th, maps below www.hmtm.de