BLOSSOMING
Music: Vito ŽurajLibretto: Händl Klaus
Co-production: Slovenian Chamber Music Theatre, SNG Maribor, Cankarjev dom LjubljanaPremière: Cankarjev dom Ljubljana, June 5, 2025
Director: Eva Hribernik
Conductor: Simon Dvoršak
Choreographer: Cleopatra Purice
Set designer: Jaro Ješe
Costume designer: Anjana Pavlič Polšak
Lighting design: Sašo Bekafigo
Choirmaster: Zsuzsa Budavari Novak
Assistant conductor: Iztok Kocen
Assistant director: Tim Ribič
Répétiteur: Larisa Rojnić, Milica Zakić
Make-up: SNG Maribor
Stage managers: Matjaž Marin, Iztok Smeh
Set producer: SNG Maribor
Producers: Katja Konvalinka, Mateja Kožuh, Janja Krivec
Photographer: Jaka Varmuž
Première in Ljubljana: June 5, 2025, Cankarjev dom Ljubljana
Première in Maribor: November 27, 2025, SNG Maribor
From the directing concept:
“The performance focuses on Aurelia and her attitude towards the passage of time. Aurelia fights against time and wants to stop it. She would like to keep spring within herself. Spring is a metaphor for youth, which she wants to keep. She is afraid of her age, and even more so of the fact that her time has "run out" and she has "bloomed" as a woman. From the moment we are born, time begins to flow for us. Life is constantly changing and we with it. How do we enter this process? What is our reaction to the changes that life brings us? Are we ready to surrender to the process of life?”
From the review:
“The director of the opera Blossoming was Eva Hribernik. She has enough experience with chamber opera that Žuraj did not cause her any problems. Her division of the action into seven scenes is natural, effective in its own way, with the central tree in the middle of the scene, with its symbolic value and metaphor for both the life of nature and man, who is only one of its parts, which we learn most about in the first scene, a dialogical meeting between mother Aurelia and her daughter, the painter Anna, who orders her to paint a flowering tree because she herself is no longer flowering, but withering.” (Marijan Zlobec, KRITIK.si, 6.6.2025)