10-year anniversary of Aalborg Opera Festival

Aalborg Opera Festival is held in Denmark every year in early March. Like Carnival in Aalborg, Aalborg Opera Festival is one of the largest festivals in Northern Europe. It's goal is to make opera music more accessible not only to fans, but for the entire population.

 

The idea of this festival originated in Aalborg Congress and Culture Center, where in 2001 hosted the first Opera Festival. The following year, the organization of the Festival have joined Aalborg Municipality and other cultural institutions of the city.

Aalborg Opera Festival aims to develop new forms of presentation and dissemination of the opera by presenting a non-traditional places where the sounds of opera, to put it mildly, unusual - such as factories, cafes, pedestrian streets, as well as cooperating with other cultural genres, such as a concert and theatrical genre.

10 th Aalborg Opera Festival took place from 4 to 13 March 2011. One of the highlights of the festival was the opera of Giuseppe Verdi "Rigoletto" (director - Anders Ahnfelt-Rønne; artists - Lars Fosser, Charlotte Hjørringgaard Larsen etc.), staged in collaboration with the theater "Nordkraft» and the Aalborg Symphony Orchestra, and and played in the open air cultural center "Nordkraft". According to organizers, the plot of "Rigoletto" is tough enough and is well suited for the raw and modern architecture of "Nordkraft". Therefore, the decorations of "Rigoletto" has been kept to a minimum - simple costumes of participants in harmony with the background of open foyer of "Nordkraft", where performers and audiences moved in accordance with the operatic acts. However, this simplicity and the involvement of the audience in the opera performance (no scene and no distance between performers and audience) allowed to make the story "Rigoletto" more emotional and tragic.

Aalborg Opera Festival organizers hope the festival can become a national event, and later, even if in some distant future - an international event in the cultural calendar of tourists.

See Photos from the Aalborg Opera Festival 2011