MIF is delighted to welcome American visionary Peter Sellars for his Festival directorial debut with a new staged piece in a long-lost Manchester venue: the Albert Hall, a gorgeous Wesleyan chapel that will be opening to the public for the first time in more than 40 years.

Shostakovich’s haunting Suite on Verses of Michelangelo Buonarroti is based on Michelangelo’s sonnets and accompanying drawings of bodies in the throes of overwhelming spiritual struggle. Says Sellars: ‘The drawings and the sonnets, in their relentless quest for forgiveness and release, achieve a kind of hard-won, exhausted but resplendent transcendence.’

The Suite will be answered by one of J.S. Bach’s most dramatic Cantatas, Ich will den Kreuzstab gerne tragen (BWV 56).
Sellars will be working with two American originals. Bass-baritone Eric Owens, one of the newest stars of New York’s Metropolitan Opera, has created a unique place in contemporary music, giving towering performances of physical and metaphysical stature, profound musicality and sheer humanity. Organist Cameron Carpenter has quickly garnered a worldwide reputation for his daring imagination, bold programming, fearless technical brilliance and ferocious, exhilarating recitals that rethink the instrument, the repertoire, the audience and the art form.

DIRECTOR
Peter Sellars

BASS-BARITONE
Eric Owens

ORGAN
Cameron Carpenter

COSTUME DESIGNER
Gabriel Berry

LIGHTING DESIGNER
James F Ingalls

Shostakovich
Suite on Verses of Michelangelo Buonarroti
Bach
Cantata BWV 56, ‘Ich will den Kreuzstab gerne tragen’


CREDIT
Commissioned and produced by Manchester International Festival, in association with Old Stories: New Lives.