Nigel Redden, the director of the festival, said that with “The Passenger” the festival would continue its record of presenting rarely performed modern and contemporary works.

In July, the opera - performed by Houston Grand Opera and conducted by Patrick Summers - will come to New York as part of the Lincoln Center Festival. The opera, produced by several European companies, will receive its American premiere at Houston Grand Opera in January. It did not receive a fully staged production until 2010, when it was presented in Bregenz, Austria, in a production by David Pountney. Shostakovich praised “The Passenger,” but it was not performed during the lifetime of Weinberg, who died in 1996. Officer thinks that she has recognized a fellow passenger as one of her former Auschwitz prisoners.

His opera “The Passenger” - based on 1959 radio play by Zofia Posmysz, an Auschwitz survivor - is set on a cruise ship in the 1950s, where a former Nazi SS Weinberg, a Jewish composer whose family was killed in the Holocaust, fled his native Poland in 1939 for the Soviet Union, where he became a protégé of Shostakovich,īut suffered under Stalin. “The Passenger” will make its belated arrival in New York this summer, when the Lincoln Center Festival and the Park Avenue Armory present Mieczyslaw Weinberg’s 1968 opera about the Holocaust, which The production of 'The Passenger' at the Bregenz Festival.

Houston grand opera 2013