Operetta enthusiast Barrie Kosky has landed a gigantic success with Offenbach’s subversive and hilarious reversion of the Orpheus myth at the Salzburg Festival. Kosky created a magically precise staging in a glittering opulent scenery and a literally devilish choreography. The dialogues are performed by the brilliant German actor Max Hopp as John Styx. Under Enrique Mazzola’s precise conducting the Wiener Philharmoniker provide “a sparkling orchestral sound” (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung): “A frantic and fabulous show” (New York Times).
Bregenz Festival 2017: Mosè in Egitto
This production from the Festspielhaus at Bregenz Festival centers on the Biblical Exodus. The universal story, with ist themes of migration and inability to deal with power, has lost none of ist urgency and topicality. By choosing an Old Testament subject, Rossini was able to get round the ban on staging operas during Lent. None the less, Mosè in Egitto contains all the ingredients of grand opera, mainly thanks to the concealed love story of the heir to the Egyptian throne. Today the moving prayer-aria of the Israelites in captivity remains the best known piece from the opera. For the staging of this rarely performed work by Rossini, Dutch director Lotte de Beer, one of the most sought-after stage directors of her generation (International Opera Newcomer Award 2015) teams up with the Dutch theatre collective Hotel Modern. While the soloists and choir relate the tale of the pharaoh and the conflicts in his family, Hotel Modern conjure up ist own reality by using live animations to portray the mass scenes and the parallel narrative of the people and the slaves. Miniature cameras, thousands of puppets, models of villages and cities and a spectacular aquarium installation present the biblical tale of plagues and the parting of the Red Sea on the Bregenz stage.
La gazzetta
The event that takes place annually in Rossini’s birthplace, praised by press and public for its witty stagings even of Rossini’s less well known works, has landed on its feet: with La gazzetta, the Rossini Opera Festival has triumphed once again! The Orchestra del Teatro Comunale di Bologna responded splendidly to the young Italian conductor Enrique Mazzola: as “one of the most gifted artists of his generation, he is not only a faithful interpreter of the score, he sends the orchestra of the Teatro di Bologna – and his
audience too – into a veritable Rossini delirium” (Deutschlandfunk). Director Marco Carniti stages his colourful production in the Paris of the 1950s, in a well-judged distillation of Rossini’s ironic social criticism: “the direction of Marco Carniti has intelligently focused on the ironic dimension of a somewhat confused libretto” (Huffington Post). Nicola
Alaimo embodies the nouveau-riche Don Pomponio Storione in every muscle: “he has confirmed his admirable dramatic qualities, with evidence of an unsuspected physical agility” (Huffington Post). Pesaro debutante Hasmik Torosyan stands out as Lisetta (Deutschlandfunk).