SOPOT, Poland — The Baltic Opera Festival celebrates a far broader musical landscape than its name suggests. For many opera lovers, especially Wagnerians, the principal attraction was Die Walküre, with Tomasz Konieczny as Wotan. Yet over the course of a week (July 1-7), the festival presented a wide-ranging program that reflected its artistic ambitions, commitment to Polish culture, and appetite for experimentation.
Konieczny, one of today’s leading Wagnerian bass-baritones and artistic director of the Baltic Opera Festival, spearheaded the revival of a century-old tradition of opera on Poland’s Baltic coast at Opera Leśna (Forest Opera) in Sopot, a seaside resort north of Gdańsk. The venue, which opened in 1909, was designed for large-scale productions in a natural forest setting with an amphitheater that seats more than 5,000 and an orchestra pit that accommodates more than 100 musicians. During the first half of the 20th century, Opera Leśna earned the nickname “Bayreuth of the North” through its annual Wagner festivals, inspired by those at Bayreuth.
The first complete staging of Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen at Opera Leśna took place in 1938, marking the culmination of its prewar Wagner tradition. After Germany invaded Poland in 1939, performances continued under Nazi administration, although wartime conditions changed their scale and instilled a political agenda. The last Wagner opera presented there before the end of the war was Siegfried in 1944. After 1945, Opera Leśna remained an important venue for concerts and other musical events, but opera appeared only intermittently, and Wagner’s works disappeared from its programs for decades.
In 2023, the Baltic Opera Festival opened with a fully staged production of Wagner’s Der fliegende Holländer conducted by Marek Janowski at Opera Leśna, restoring the venue’s historic connection with the composer. The 2026 Walküre was significant both as the return of Wagner’s Ring repertoire to Opera Leśna and as part of the commemoration of the 150th anniversary of the first complete Ring cycle at Bayreuth in 1876.
Baltic Opera Festival reimagines Wagner’s mythical world in a forest setting. It presented John Fulljames’ Walküre, a co-production with the Royal Danish Opera and the Greek National Opera. Fulljames approached Wagner’s mythic universe through a contemporary lens, portraying the gods not as distant figures of legend but as ambitious, compromised human beings.
The concept is most clearly expressed in the first act, in which Wotan appears as a designer orchestrating the sets and controlling the unfolding drama. The Valkyries become office staff, executing Wotan’s plans and celebrating his triumphs, including the Wälsungs’ reunion and victory over Hunding. Yet Wotan’s triumph is fleeting, evaporating when he yields to Fricka’s demands. With that, the peripheral elements of the staging disappear, leaving the focus squarely on the human drama between father and daughter.
A Scandinavian aesthetic of simplicity, neutral color palettes, and cool elegance define Tom Scutt’s sets and costumes. The production’s dominant visual element is an enormous staircase that transforms throughout the evening. Its underside serves as Hunding’s hut, pierced by the trunk of the immense ash tree. The staircase then recedes to reveal the office where Fricka confronts Wotan before it returns as the central image of the final act, which Fulljames stages with clarity and directness, culminating in real flames surrounding the rock on which Brünnhilde sleeps until awakened by a hero who knows no fear.
Given the size of the theater and vagaries of weather, amplification was a necessary evil, though it was employed with the lightest of touches. Freed from the superhuman effort of projecting in such a space, the singers delivered especially nuanced performances. The Baltic Opera Orchestra, augmented by the Lviv National Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra and conducted by Axel Kober, performed without sound enhancement. Kober’s reading of the score emphasized lyricism and a finely calibrated orchestral palette, while maintaining forward propulsion and urgency whenever required.
Konieczny performed Wotan at the production’s premiere in Copenhagen in 2022, bringing that experience to bear in a deeply moving portrayal in which the god’s failures undermine both his divine authority and his compassion for his children. Unencumbered by heavy robes, wigs, or a helmet, Konieczny’s agile physicality, together with his expressive face, conveyed as much emotion as his voice. Wotan’s farewell to Brünnhilde was so affecting that it left many audience members in tears.
Stéphanie Müther’s Brünnhilde was an equally complex blend of passion, defiance, and filial love. Her voice is lighter than is usual for the role, yet it possesses the thrust and amplitude to ride the orchestral waves on which her Valkyrie soared. Stanislas de Barbeyrac was a magnificent Siegmund, swarthy in appearance and unrelenting in vocal and dramatic intensity. As Sieglinde, Izabela Matuła proved equally compelling, singing with singular intensity and dramatic force.
Chic and imperious, Małgorzata Walewska’s Fricka pierced Wotan’s evasions and deceptions with haughty disdain. René Pape was a grizzled, uncouth Hunding whose bass still resounded with richness and authority.
Konieczny was a visible presence throughout the festival, attending performances and related events. In one impromptu address, he remarked that one of his guiding principles as the festival’s artistic director was to take risks. That philosophy was evident in the reimagining of Józef Beer‘s The Polish Wedding. Although not always fully cohesive, the production drew its strength from its star-quality performances and unabashed patriotic fervor, heightened by its performance in a Polish translation of the original German libretto.
Beer (1908–1987) was an Austro-Polish composer born in Lviv (then Austria-Hungary, now Ukraine). After studying in Vienna, he achieved international success with The Polish Wedding, which premiered in Zurich in 1937 and was staged in some 40 European theaters before a planned Broadway production, which never happened. The Nazi persecution of the Jewish composer abruptly ended that success, and his music largely disappeared from the repertoire.
Set in the Polish lands under Russian rule around 1830, The Polish Wedding combines a romantic tale of love and intrigue with themes of national identity and the enduring Polish struggle for independence. The story follows Count Bolesław Zagórski, a young Polish patriot who has been living in exile after fighting against Russian rule. Disguised under a false identity, he secretly returns to his homeland to marry his childhood sweetheart, Jadzia.
Her debt-ridden father, Baron Ogiński, has arranged her marriage to Bolesław’s wealthy uncle, the elderly Count Staszek Zagórski, whose five previous marriages have done nothing to dampen his enthusiasm for another. The match would erase the Baron’s debts, but Jadzia refuses. A whirlwind of mistaken identities and comic intrigue — driven by the estate manager Zuzu, nicknamed the “Wildcat” — ultimately allows true love to prevail amid soaring melodies, vivid color and exuberant choreography.
Daria Kubisiak and Maćko Prusak reimagined The Polish Wedding as a contemporary musical theater work rather than a museum piece. Anyone expecting a traditional Viennese operetta with a Polish flavor was in for a surprise. The staging, multimedia, and exuberant dances successfully refreshed the work for modern audiences. The additions largely strengthened the drama, particularly a prologue establishing the historical setting and an extended sequence in which Staszek’s five former wives appeared as Jadzia’s bridesmaids, reliving the horrors of their marriages. The production faltered, however, when it tampered with Beer’s score, blunting its dramatic momentum.
Beer was dubbed the “Polish Gershwin” for blending Polish folk music, jazz, and Viennese operetta. Andrzej Jagodziński’s new arrangements pushed the jazz idiom much further. Stylishly played by the Andrzej Jagodziński Trio, they nevertheless sat uneasily beside Beer’s own idiom, creating an occasionally disorienting sense of musical time travel.
The cast, however, was the real thing. It remains a mystery why such splendid voices required amplification, even with the spoken dialogue. Piotr Buszewski was a dashing Bolesław, singing with abandon and making the most of the thrilling climaxes Beer gives his tenor hero. Monika Radecka’s sensitive acting and lustrous soprano captured all of Jadzia’s emotional upheavals with equal grace. The restraint and sincerity of their performances were all the more impressive given the no-holds-barred comic turns from the production’s other leading performers.
Marta Wiktorzak‘s Zuza was a spitfire estate manager who transformed into a glamorous cabaret entertainer bedecked in fur to sing the operetta’s best-known number, “Katzenaugen,” with Hubert Zapiór’s equally winning Kazimierz von Kawiecki. The duet arrives as an unexpected burst of Charleston-inflected exuberance, its erotic Viennese swagger triumphing over Jagodziński’s more subdued jazz interpolations. In what is essentially a buffo role, Grzegorz Szostak‘s lecherous Staszek was a master of comic timing. Whether serving as sidekick or foil, Jerzy Butryn‘s Ogiński matched him with equal aplomb.
The Baltic Opera Festival’s The Polish Wedding is a co-production with Wrocław Opera, whose chorus, orchestra, and dancers performed in the production’s premiere. The performance benefited enormously from Łukasz Borowicz‘s experienced musical direction. Holding the production’s disparate elements together with remarkable assurance, he conducted with energy, polish, and unmistakable affection for Beer’s score.
After drama and exuberance came the purity of Krzysztof Penderecki’s music in a program entitled The Museum of Man – Penderecki in Memoriam. Performed by the Sinfonietta Cracovia under Michał Klauza, it paid tribute to the composer (1933-2020) and his wife, Elżbieta Penderecka. The concert was deeply personal, as the couple had been instrumental in the orchestra’s founding. Penderecka also served on the Honorary Committee of the Baltic Opera Festival and played a vital role in shaping its vision before her death in October 2025.
The four works, composed over more than four decades, all reflect Penderecki’s engagement with earlier musical forms. Their grace and complexity emerged through the warmth and transparency of sound Klauza drew from the players. In a pristine performance of Three Pieces in Old Style (1963), the strings caressed the graceful melodies with equal sensitivity and beauty. In the Menuet and Finale, their elegance was animated by meticulous attention to detail and rhythmic verve.
Clarinetist Andrzej Ciepliński was the soloist in the four-movement Sinfonietta No. 2 (1994), a reworking of Penderecki’s earlier Clarinet Quartet into a concerto-like work for solo clarinet and string orchestra. Rather than a virtuoso showpiece, it is an intimate dialogue between soloist and ensemble. Whether shaping an elegiac melody, a romantic serenade, or engaging in witty, rhythmically vital exchanges with the ensemble, Ciepliński’s playing remained relaxed, fluid, and warm against the perfectly balanced sonority Klauza drew from the orchestra. In the final movement, “Abschied,” the clarinet dissolved into a silence so profound that the audience chose to absorb the moment rather than break it with applause.
One of Penderecki’s most personal and moving works followed: the Chaconne from the Polish Requiem (2005), dedicated to the memory of Pope John Paul II, heard here in its arrangement for string orchestra. The brief work is a meditation in which the recurring bass line becomes the musical embodiment of memory. From the opening measures, played by the lower strings with penetrating intensity, Klauza shaped an impeccable performance in which the tension mounted with each piercing dissonance and crystalline suspension before reaching its climax and finally receding into stillness.
In the 1980s, Marian Zak created choreography for Penderecki’s groundbreaking Partita for harpsichord and orchestra, transforming it into The Museum of Man, which premiered at the Silesian Opera. For the festival, Zak and Andrzej Grabowski reimagined the original choreography for dancers from the Kraków Opera Ballet. Penderecki’s score, with its innate Baroque elegance enriched by an unconventional instrumental palette — including electric guitar, bass guitar, harp, and solo double bass — became the catalyst for a meditation on what might remain of humanity in a post-apocalyptic world.
In Zak and Grabowski’s conception, a group of survivors discovers a museum but can no longer decipher the meaning of the artworks that have endured, chiefly monumental sculptures of the human form. They have themselves evolved into beings distinct from the figures they encounter. Across a series of unsettling scenes, they prove just as vulnerable to the illusions of the past and just as capable of destruction. Penderecki’s music and the dancers’ sinewy, unnerving movement ultimately leave their fate unresolved.
The festival concluded with Madame, I Love You, a program dedicated to the poetry of Heinrich Heine, performed by soprano Anett Fritsch, pianist Florian Krumpöck, and actor and stage director Sven-Erich Bechtolf. The venue was the European Solidarity Centre, the Gdańsk museum documenting the rise of Solidarity and Poland’s peaceful revolution that brought an end to Communist rule. It stands near Gate No. 2 of the Gdańsk Shipyard, where the Solidarity movement was born in August 1980.
Left to their own devices, Fritsch, with her silvery, shimmering soprano, and Krumpöck, with his refined pianism, would have given an exceptional song recital. Perhaps that was the original intention: a traditional evening of Lieder enriched by poetry readings that traced a love story from tender intimacy to bitter recrimination. Bechtolf’s arched delivery, in which world-weariness and wit mingled with a gauzy nostalgia and the perspective of age, overturned that expectation.
Krumpöck began with Schumann’s “Warum?” from Fantasiestücke, Op. 12, shaping its gentle, questioning phrases with restraint and inwardness. The miniature’s unanswered longing established the emotional world of an evening devoted to Heine’s poetry, where love’s joys and wounds were explored through song and spoken word. A carefully chosen sequence of Heine settings by Felix Mendelssohn, Clara and Robert Schumann, and Richard Strauss followed. Throughout, Fritsch demonstrated a command of the text every bit as assured as Bechtolf’s spoken delivery. Among the lyrical highlights were Schumann’s “Ich wandelte unter den Bäumen,” Mendelssohn’s “Neue Liebe,” Schumann’s “Ich hab’ im Traum geweinet,” in which Fritsch drained her voice to a pale, ghostly whiteness, and Clara Schumann’s “Lorelei,” displaying the singer’s and pianist’s impressive narrative gifts.
The final printed song was Robert Schumann’s “Ich grolle nicht,” from Dichterliebe, Op.48. Although its title declares that the heartbroken lover bears no grudge, Heine’s poem tells a different story through its bitter recriminations. It would have been an uncomfortably bleak conclusion not only to the recital but also to the 2026 Baltic Opera Festival. Instead, after one final spoken monologue from Bechtolf, came Mendelssohn’s “Auf Flügeln des Gesanges,” its shimmering piano accompaniment and expressions of enduring love providing a gentle, luminous farewell.
