Oper Frankfurt continues its loose series of works by Benjamin Britten (1913-1976) with two church parables at the Bockenheimer Depot. In 1948, the British composer and like-minded friends founded a music festival in Aldeburgh, a fishing village on the coast of eastern England, which still exists today. Among the new venues for musical theater tested there was the parish church of St. Bartholomew in the nearby town of Orford. For this space, Britten and his librettist William Plomer created musical parables based on texts from the Bible as a symbiosis between Christian and Far Eastern forms of theater. Britten developed a new tonal language for this, using exotic instruments in addition to the conventional orchestration, although his personal style nevertheless remains recognizable. The audience can be curious to see how the works, shown for the first time in Frankfurt, will come into their own in the Bockenheimer Depot, which is not unlike a church hall.
