<\/p>\n
No dress code, no stiff atmosphere and no entry fees:\u00a0Thousands flocked to a Viennese park Sunday as the Vienna State Opera opened its 2025-26 season with a star-studded open-air gala concert for the first time.<\/p>\n
The free, open-air concert was the state opera’s latest effort to “open the house to all \u2013 especially new listeners”, it said in a statement.<\/p>\n
Among the world-class singers performing were Latvian mezzo-soprano Elina Garanca, German tenor Jonas Kaufmann, Finnish soprano Camilla Nylund and French tenor Benjamin Bernheim.<\/p>\n
“I’m very happy that I can be a part of such an event because our goal is to communicate with people, regardless their race, nationality, the political situation, and the cultural differences,” Garanca told AFP.<\/p>\n
“I find it really great that the house makes a step towards the audience instead of all the time waiting for them,” said the world-renowned mezzo.\u00a0She hoped the gala concert would become a “yearly tradition”, she said.<\/p>\n
Many visitors sat on picnic blankets or chairs as they enjoyed the concert with friends and family.<\/p>\n
– ‘Eager to learn’ –<\/p>\n
“We have no clue who is performing tonight, but we’re eager to learn — and I like classical music, I played when I was a kid,” Jeremy Gregoire, a Canadian ice hockey player who recently moved to Vienna, told AFP ahead of the concert.<\/p>\n
Embassy employee Thanthida Helbardt, 43, who originally hails from Thailand, told AFP she learned about the concert online and decided to give it a try.<\/p>\n
Even before the concert began, the packed park was closed to more visitors meaning many would be concert-goers were turned away for security reasons.<\/p>\n
The concert included audience favourites from famous operas such as Puccini’s “Tosca”, Wagner and Mozart’s “Le Nozze di Figaro” as well as Strauss pieces.<\/p>\n
Austrian broadcaster ORF aired the concert with a one-hour delay Sunday evening.<\/p>\n
The gala also marks the Vienna State Opera’s 70th anniversary.<\/p>\n
In recent years, opera houses across the globe have tried different measures to draw in new opera-goers\u00a0to a world that is often considered high-brow and old-fashioned.<\/p>\n
kym\/jj<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
\u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.yahoo.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" No dress code, no stiff atmosphere and no entry fees:\u00a0Thousands flocked to a Viennese park Sunday as the Vienna State Opera opened its 2025-26 season with a star-studded open-air gala concert for the first time. The free, open-air concert was the state opera’s latest effort to “open the house to all \u2013 especially new listeners”, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2004604,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25172],"tags":[365284,365283,365279,365280,365282,365285,365281,365278],"class_list":["post-2004603","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-entertainment","tag-benjamin-bernheim","tag-camilla-nylund","tag-elina-garanca","tag-gala-concert","tag-joe-klamar","tag-jonas-kaufmann","tag-open-air-concert","tag-vienna-state-opera"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/Vienna-State-Opera-opens-season-with-free-all-star-gala-concert.jpeg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2004603","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2004603"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2004603\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2004604"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2004603"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2004603"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2004603"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}