This exhibition with more than 300 works is both an introduction and an overview of the essential components of French photographer Guy Bourdin's (1928-1991) oeuvre. It aims to establish his status as a visionaire image maker and his inspiring power which still have such significance for artists of our decades like e.g. Madonna, that she was successfully taken to court for plagiarism by Guy Bourdins heirs for her video Hollywood in 2004.

Bourdin's high-profile years, in the 1970s, saw his images featured on the pages of top fashion magazines. Already in his mid forties by this time, his editorial and advertising photography broke with the conventions of fashion imagery in radical ways. His photographs of carefully staged narratives plunge the viewer into a fantasy world of glamour, pleasure, danger and suspense. Bourdin made it clear, as no other photographer before him had done, that we are seduced by the fashion image rather than the product the image promotes.

From the mid 1950s, Bourdin experimented and refined his distinct vision. At the same time as he produced his famous fashion images, he compulsively photographed and filmed his observations of the world in which he moved.

Guy Bourdin was born in 1928 and spent much of his youth living in post-war Paris. An assiduous observer of culture, he showed precocious artistic talent and fierce ambition. His innovative fashion photographs first appeared in French Vogue in 1954 and he continued to work mainly for the magazine for the next 30 years.

The exhibition includes modern prints, b/w 1950s vintage prints, Polaroids, cinefilms - early 1970s, landscape slide show, sketches and texts.

The Belvedere presents the early work of Oskar Kokoschka - the most important representative of Austrian expressionism - in an encompassing monographic exhibition.

Early in his career, Kokoschka reached international fame with graphic contributions characterised by the linear style of the Vienna Secession as well as literary works for the avant-garde journal ‘Sturm’. In the same period his portraits also caused a sensation as these were not rendering the mere physics of the sitters but their subjective emotional condition.

Featuring 120 works of art (oil paintings and works on paper) the show covers all of Kokoschka's expressive media and visualises his artistic development from the ‘Dreaming Lad’ of Art Nouveau to the expressionist "Enfant terrible" of European art history. In addition to works from his days at the School of Applied Arts, such as the ‘Nudes’ featuring Lilith Lang, there are important works representing Kokoschka’s literary oeuvre. The Kokoschka pieces owned by the Belvedere are complemented by prominent loans such as the portraits Vater Hirsch (Father Hirsch), the Doppelporträt Hans Tietze und Erika Tietze-Conrat (Double portrait of Hans Tietze and Erika Tietze-Conrat) the Stilleben mit Putto und Kaninchen (Still life with putto and rabbit) and Die Freunde (The friends).

Included in this show are also masterworks by Auguste Rodin, Paul Gauguin and George Minne as these artists exerted lasting influence on Oskar Kokoschka.

The Alban Berg Quartet has been the leading draw in string quartets, for over thirty years. The Viennese quartet is revered, notably in Europe, for its ablility to communicate the same classical elegance and Central European style in Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven and Schubert as in Berg, Bartok or Janacek.

Among their many recording projects have been the complete quartets by Beethoven, Brahms, Berg, Webern and Bartok, the complete late Mozart and late Schubert quartets, Haydn, Dvorak, Schumann, Ravel, Debussy, Stravinsky, von Einem and Haubenstock-Ramati, as well as live recordings from the Carnegie Hall, New York, the Opera Comique in Paris, the Queen Elizabeth Hall in London and particularly from the Konzerthaus in Vienna.

Founded in 1971, the Alban Berg Quartett is on an international tour of farwell concerts in Europe, the United States and South America. The last concert will take place in Buenos Aires in July 2008.

Programme: Haydn, Beethoven, Berg

Onegin
John Cranko, choreographer
Music: Tchaikovsky

Tamás Solymosi (Onegin) 
Vladimir Malakhov (Lenski)   
Polina Semionova (Tatjana)
Maria Yakovleva (Olga)    
Wolfgang Grascher (Fürst Gremin)
Orchestra of the Vienna State Opera
András Déri, conductor    

Phaedra
Concert opera
in two acts (2007) by Hans Werner Henze

Libretto by Christian Lehnert

Austrian premiere
 
Phaedra: Maria Riccarda Wesseling
Aphrodite: Marlis Petersen
Hippolytus: Jeremy Ovenden
Artemis: Axel Köhler
Minotaur: Lauri Vasar
Ensemble Modern orchestra
Michael Boder, conductor 
Peter Mussbach, director
Stage design: Olafur Eliasson
Costumes: Bernd Skodzig
Light design: Olaf Freese

Henze wrote Phaedra for five protagonists and 24 musicians, mainly wind players and percussionists. As part of a body of experience accumulated in over forty stage works, his 14th opera once more opts for a mythological plot. The young poet and theologian Christian Lehnert has collaged stories from Greek and Roman antiquity for the libretto: Phaedra desires her stepson Hippolytus, who rejects her. Out of revenge, she accuses him of rape, and Hippolytus is put to death. In the second act, Artemis, the goddess of the hunt, restores Hippolytus to life, and he becomes a forest divinity in her realm by Lake Nemi (near Rome, where Henze, too, owns a country house), where he is ultimately killed by the bull-man Minotaur.

Wagner: Siegfried

Stephen Gould (Siegfried) 
Nina Stemme (Brünnhilde)
Juha Uusitalo (Der Wanderer)   
Herwig Pecoraro (Mime)
Orchestra of the Vienna State Opera
Franz Welser-Möst, conductor

Interracial
A play by Mpumelelo Paul Grootboom and Aubrey Sekhabi
English, surtitled in German

European premiere

Cast: Vuyani Shadrack Dlomo, Loungo Masire, Koketso Mojela, Kedibone Tholo, Dineo Ramailane, Modise Mphatsoe, Olebogeng Boitumelo Phang Sebotha, Segomotso Modise, Thatale Klaas Motebejane,  Gaolatlhe Mathenyane, Sello Johannes Zikalala, Brian Chokwe

Director: Mpumelelo Paul Grootboom 
Music Director: Kholofelo Kola 
Choreographer: Israel Bereta 
Set & Lighting Designer: Declan Randall

Young director and filmmaker Mpumelelo Paul Grootboom has created an explosive theatrical performance reflecting on the unsolvable racial problems in contemporary South Africa. The presentation begins with a reminiscence of old minstrel shows. An ensemble of black performers is engaged in a discussion. The white performers have abandoned the debate. Apartheid has disappeared, but economic and racially motivated exclusion still remains.

A white homeless man living with his black girlfriend in a public park befriends a suicidal black youth. Their friendship is like almost all relationships between blacks and whites in South Africa – ridden with guilt and irresolvable misunderstandings. A white therapist discovers that his wife cheats on him with a black man and has the couple killed by contract hitmen. During the police investigation of the case, it becomes evident that the white therapist is a character from a book the homeless man is writing. The interracial killing is never resolved, the whole story will never be told.

“If you don’t want to play with us and live with us, just go back where you came from.” In his powerful, polemic production, Mpumelelo Paul Grootboom shows a slice of South African realities that is totally out of sync with preconceived European notions.

Schauspielhaus
Vienna