This year’s final sounds of the Opera Rara Festival brings the Péter Eötvös’s spectacle intertwining opera, musical, grotesque and psychodrama directed by Karolina Sofulak. The Golden Dragon explores important social topics of exclusion, migration and poverty.

The setting: a generic oriental restaurant, The Golden Dragon, in an anonymous European city. A Chinese cook suffers from terrible toothache but as an illegal immigrant he is reluctant to see a dentist. His colleagues step in to pull out the offending tooth. The man bleeds to death and the tooth lands in a bowl of soup destined for one of the customers… The tragicomic, absurd, grotesque and in places brutal opera The Golden Dragon is an important element in the contemporary discussion on immigration, as is its universal – and painful – message. It explores themes of chance, unfulfilled dreams and hopelessness. The opera by the Hungarian composer Péter Eötvös is performed by the Spółdzielnia Muzyczna contemporary ensemble under the baton of Edo Frenkel.

Péter Eötvös The Golden Dragon, dir. Karolina Sofulak
Robin Steitz – soprano
Helena Rasker – mezzo-soprano
Peter Tantsits – tenor
Karol Kozłowski – tenor
Łukasz Klimczak – baritone
Spółdzielnia Muzyczna contemporary ensemble
Edo Frenkel – conductor