Season Preview: Your guide to the arts in 2022

For their inaugural Adelaide Festival in 2017, Joint Artistic Directors Neil Armfield and Rachel Healy programmed Barrie Kosky’s dazzling production of Handel’s oratorio Saul as the opening weekend centrepiece.

Kosky – the now legendary Melbourne-born, Berlin-based director – was no stranger to the Adelaide Festival, having been its Artistic Director in 1996 at the age of 29, but Saul was the first work of his to be presented at the Festival. Originally staged at Glyndebourne Festival Opera in 2015, it sold out in Adelaide and proved a sensation.

In 2019, Armfield and Healy programmed Kosky’s Komische Oper Berlin production of The Magic Flute, co-directed with Suzanne Andrade from British theatre company 1927, which was also a sell-out hit.

The Golden Cockerel

The Golden Cockerel at the Festival d’Aix-en Provence, 2021. Photo © Jean-Louis Fernandez

The Adelaide Festival announced today that Koksy’s production of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s last opera The Golden Cockerel will be the centrepiece of the 2022 program. Tickets will doubtless fly out of the door given Kosky’s reputation for bringing a fresh, startling,...