The Russian Society of Friends of the Salzburg Festival has announced the dates of the 2019 program. For the first time, the Russian program will run five days instead of the usual four, on August 12-16, 2019.

Valery Gergiev returns to Salzburg as musical director of the production of Verdi's opera Simon Boccanegra. The works of Pyotr Tchaikovsky will be performed under the direction of Barenboim. The central event of the Russian 2019 program will be Idomeneo, the opening opera of the Salzburg Festival from the Sellars-Currentzis star duo. The Russian Society of Friends of the Salzburg Festival is supporting this production.

Medea, Maria Callas' favorite opera, will be performed by the Bulgarian soprano Sonia Yoncheva (the friends of the Festival remember her from the triumphant Coronation of Poppaea of the 2018 season). Italian diva Cecilia Bartoli will play Alcina in the opera of the same name, written by Handel based on one of the episodes of Ariosto's Furious Roland. The audience expects to have a director's master class from Achim Freyer, the patriarch of the German stage and student of Bertolt Brecht: since the world premiere in 1936, Oedipus has been staged only a few times. The production of Orpheus in Hell by the main master of the light genre on today's European stage, Barry Koski, promises to become one of the box-office hits of the festival.