Salzburg has a newly renovated concert hall - Haus für Mozart

Salzburg - During the day, they allow a view outside to the city, while at night, conversely, they shine and offer a glimpse inside. The new tall windows in the foyer of the concert and theater hall Haus für Mozart in Salzburg have become one of the typical features of the building, which has been sensitively reconstructed from the former Small Festival House into a modern hall. It opened to the public last weekend during the Salzburg Festival, which this year celebrates the 250th anniversary of the famous native Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
The reconstruction, which cost 29 million euros (over 800 million Czech korunas), expanded the number of seats in the auditorium by 250 to nearly 1600. The hall can host chamber concerts, but staged works are also performed there. The acoustic parameters of the space were designed so that Mozart's operas sound ideally here.
Haus für Mozart, whose facade connects to the Great Festival House, is one of 14 venues where this year's festival takes place. Following six performances of Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro, a new production starring young Russian soprano Anna Netrebko as one of the main stars, operas Abduction from the Seraglio and Idomeneo will be performed there in August.
In the adjacent Great Festival House from the 1920s, the program includes operas such as The Magic Flute, Cosi fan tutte, and Don Giovanni, as well as concerts by the Vienna and Berlin Philharmonics and recitals by the biggest stars. Another venue for larger concerts and opera performances is the adjacent covered Felsenreitschule (former Rock Riding School). There, after the opera Lucio Silla, the production of the opera La clemenza di Tito will primarily take up residence.
A number of concerts are held in the nearby Residence and in the university auditorium, and especially in the Mozarteum hall on the other side of the Salzach River. There is also the Regional Theater and the famous Puppet Theater, which this year prepared productions of two Mozart operas - Bastien and Bastienne and The Impresario.
The several years of work on the reconstruction of the Haus für Mozart auditorium cost the festival nearly nine million euros (over 250 million Czech korunas) from its own funds. One of a number of large private patrons contributed over four million euros. Smaller amounts were sent by people from around the world. A seventeen-meter-high gilded lamella wall in the foyer, behind which Mozart's head emerges, cost a company 800,000 euros.
The campaign to obtain contributions and donations for the House for Mozart was, according to the festival's president Helga Rabl-Stadler, the largest in the eighty-year history of the Salzburg Festival. The interior is expected to be further enriched by new works of art in the future. The decision on what will be purchased has not yet been made.

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