French actress Marion Cotillard will come to Bucharest for next year’s edition of the George Enescu International Festival. The actress will star as Jeanne D’arc in Arthur Honegger’s Jean d’Arc au bûcher oratorio, in a performance of Orchestre National de Lille.

Stars of the classical music world such as pianist Mitsuko Uchida, countertenor and conductor Rene Jacobs, conductor Kirill Petrenko, pianist Yuja Wang, sopranos Diana Damrau and Joyce DiDonato, tenor Rolando Villazón and violinist and pianist Julia Fischer are also part of the lineup of the event, which takes place between August 31 and September 22 of next year.

As previously announced, the Berlin Philharmonic orchestra will open the festival, conducted by Kirill Petrenko. The orchestra will perform Geroge Enescu’s Rhapsody no. 2 in D major and Beethoven’s Symphony no. 9 in D minor. This is the second time the Berlin Philharmonic performs in the Romanian capital, having attended the 2015 edition of the Enescu Festival.

In addition to its regular program sections, such as Great Orchestras of the World, By Midnight concerts or Music of the 21^st century, the 2019 festival will add new repertory formulas, such as "opera in concert" or Mozart Week in Residence. The latter is a series of concerts aiming to explore Mozart’s music from a new perspective.

Another novelty of next year’s edition is the passes’ lottery. The lottery system is meant to ensure better chances for the public to acquire passes for the event. The tickets and passes for the George Enescu Festival usually sell out very quickly online, sometimes in minutes from the moment of being put on sale, leaving many unable to purchase them. Under the new system, those interested can register for the lottery, online or offline, throughout a month, between October 22 and November 25. After the registration ends, a software will select those who will have a reserved pass at the festival. The reserved passes need to be paid within two weeks, otherwise the passes will go on sale again. The individual tickets will go on sale on March 6, 2019.

Overall, the 2019 Enescu Festival will cover 84 concerts and recitals only in the Bucharest concert venues. Over 2,500 artists from all over the world will be present at the event, where 32 works by George Enescu will be performed.

The festival takes place in Bucharest and in seven other cities in the country: Cluj-Napoca, Timişoara, Iaşi, Sibiu, Târgu Mureş, Bacău and Târgovişte.

The program of the festival is available here.

(Photo: Nicogenin Flickr/Wikipedia)

editor@romania-insider.com