Weinberg’s ‘The Passenger’ at Park Avenue Armory as part of 2014 Lincoln Center Festival

NEW YORK, N.Y. – “The Passenger,” Mieczyslaw Weinberg’s 1968 opera about the Holocaust, will be given its New York premiere at the Park Avenue Armory next summer as part of the Lincoln Center Festival.

Mezzo-soprano Michelle Breedt will sing Liese in the David Pountney production, a role she performed when the staging opened at the 2010 Bregenz Festival in Austria. Tenor Joseph Kaiser will sing Walter.

Patrick Summers will conduct the opera in New York following performances he will lead in January at the Houston Grand Opera, where he is artistic and music director.

The opera, to be sung in English, portrays a German couple travelling on an ocean liner in the 1950s. Liese, a former SS officer, thinks she recognizes a former Auschwitz prisoner as one of the passengers.

Pountney’s staging of Bernd Alois Zimmermann’s “Die Soldaten” was presented at the Armory’s Drill Hall as part of the 2008 Lincoln Center Festival.

There will be performances July 10, 12 and 13. The staging is a co-production that also includes the Teatr Wielki in Warsaw, the English National Opera and the Teatro Real in Madrid.