Pet Halmen

Stage director, stage, costume and lighting designer
(Turandot)

Born in Romania, Pet Halmen first trained as a theatre painter in Berlin, worked as assistant to numerous celebrated stage designers and did his first stage designs for theatres in Düsseldorf, Munich and Schwerzingen. An encounter with stage director Jean-Pierre Ponnelle led to collaboration over productions of works by Monteverdi and Mozart in Zurich with Nikolaus Harnoncourt as the conductor. Then came opera assignments from New York, San Francisco, Washington, Houston, Chicago, Milan, Hamburg, Munich and Vienna, and film versions of Elektra with Karl Böhm and Götz Friedrich and La clemenza di Tito in its authentic Roman environment. This Mozart opera was also Halmen’s first direction. Since then (1986) he has been increasingly oriented towards stage directing and designing, in Paris, Nice, Antwerp, Charleston, Tokyo, Pretoria, Santiago de Chile, Salzburg, Toulouse and elsewhere.