Classic Openair Solothurn

An opera enthusiast named Dino Arici started this summer festival in 1991 as a private venture, and for two decades it filled the St Ursen bastion in Solothurn with staged opera in the open air, the Rythalle standing by whenever the weather turned. Verdi carried much of the repertoire — Nabucco, Macbeth, Don Carlo, Un ballo in maschera — with Mozart's Magic Flute in 2008, and a single season could run to five operas, an orchestral concert, operetta and gala nights. Arici stepped down in 2010; the 2011 edition was lost to the change of hands, Iris Kofmel took over that February, and in November the festival was renamed Solothurn Classics. Audiences fell away, a planned merger with Oper Schenkenberg came to nothing when that company also failed, and the organisation filed for bankruptcy in early 2017. The bastion stage is silent now, but for some twenty summers it was among the more ambitious undertakings a Swiss town of that size had attempted.