December 13, 2024 will go down in the annals of Nürnberg as a historic date. A handful of "bigwigs" (Bavarian for all kinds of dignitaries) met on the Nazi Party Rally Grounds in the southeast of the city to break ground for the interim headquarters of the Nürnberg Opera. Music theater and ballet are expected to move into a new building from 2028, attached to the so-called Colosseum — a monumental Nazi ruin that is to be put to a useful operational purpose by being used as an opera. However, Nürnberg's current ballet director Goyo Montero is retiring before the move: At the end of the season, he will move to the top position in Hannover, whose former director Marco Goecke will in turn be hired in Basel. The day after the groundbreaking ceremony, the two choreographers show a two-part evening on the stage of the opera house which is in need of renovation: Strawinsky features Goecke's Scènes de ballet and Montero's Feuervogel one after the other: a magnificent diptych linking the past to the present.
A man emerges from the darkness, bare torso, dark trousers. Behind him, an anthracite-grey maw yawns, flashes of light whiz by, thunder sweeps away the silence. No natural backdrop, but muzzle flashes and cannon shots — signals of a battle wafting over from the nowhere of an imaginary battlefield. In the depths of the orchestra pit, the members of the Staatsphilharmonie Nürnberg also listen to them before conductor Roland Böer raises his baton for the brief Introduction, the start of a fabulously musical quarter of an hour.
