In 2008, an exciting new international opera-singer project was launched in the framework of the Salzburg Festival, the Young Singers Project, sponsored by Montblanc International. Led by world-renowned tenor Michael Schade and soprano Barbara Bonney, a small number of selected young talents from around the world were invited to train their vocal and acting skills for several weeks during the festival season. The “stars of tomorrow” live together, attend master classes with great singers, take part in rehearsals, learn roles from operas being given at the festival – in short, they are invited by the most prestigious music festival in the world to prepare for their future musical career. This documentary records the first edition of the “Young Singers Project,” an artistic endeavor that reflects the Salzburg Festival’s growing experience and success in providing the stage for the breakthrough of such renowned artists like Anna Netrebko. In this program, the students are briefly introduced by Schade and Bonney, and are shown working with their mentors, including such distinguished master class guest professors as Christa Ludwig and Jürgen Flimm. Their spontaneity and dynamism draw us into their lives; their talent and ambition make us hope that they will soon conquer the world’s great stages, such as the Salzburg Festival itself. As the crowning point of the documentary, the program also features excerpts from the final concert in which all eleven young singers perform with the Mozarteum Orchestra Salzburg under the direction of Ivor Bolton. Here the festival public was able to admire the artists at the threshold of their international career. One of them, Joel Prieto, won the first prize in Plácido Domingo’s Operalia Competition in 2008, and is thus already on his way to fulfilling his dream.
Giulio Cesare in Egitto
Triumphantly premiered in 1724 at the King’s Theatre in London, George Frideric Handel’s Giulio Cesare in Egitto masterfully combines human emotions: Triumph with sorrow, despair with happiness and love with profound melancholy in the face of the transience of all earthly life. Star director Keith Warner creates a production that imaginatively blends silent film and baroque opera, delightfully echoing Mankiewicz’s legendary Cleopatra with Elizabeth Taylor, Rex Harrison and Richard Burton. An excellent cast of singers is led by two of the world’s leading countertenors: Bejun Mehta and Christophe Dumaux. Louise Alder shines as the seductive Cleopatra. Patricia Bardon, Simon Bailey and Jake Arditti are further highlights in this extraordinary group of singers, while Ivor Bolton provides the appropriate soundtrack on the podium of the Concentus Musicus Wien. “Cheers for all involved” Kurier. “A must for baroque opera fans.” Kronen Zeitung
Salzburg Festival 2013: A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Shakespeare / Mendelssohn)
The new production of Shakespeares’ A Midsummer Night’s Dream with the incidental music by Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy from Salzburg Festival 2013 is performed in a new translation and edition by Austrian director Henry Mason. Ivor Bolton, chief conductor of the Mozarteum Orchestra Salzburg, leads the open-air perfomance at Salzburg’s stunning Courtyard of the Residenz Palace.
Salzburg Festival 2012: Das Labyrinth
2012 marked the 200th anniversary of the death of Emanuel Schikaneder, certainly one of the most original and influential theater impresarios of his time and generation. What is less well-known is the fact that Schikaneder himself wrote a second part for The Magic Flute, entitled Das Labyrinth oder Der Kampf mit den Elementen (The Labyrinth, or the Struggle with the Elements). Schikaneder entrusted this work to the Bavarian composer Peter von Winter, widely celebrated in Vienna at the time. Ivor Bolton conducts his Salzburg Mozarteum Orchestra energetically, smoothly and elegantly, bringing out the best in Winter’s charming music with its cleverly interwoven echoes of Mozart. The soloists are from the top drawer: Michael Schade triumphs as Tamino, while Thomas Tatzl and Anton Scharinger are a brilliant young and old Papageno. Coloratura soprano Julia Novikova is in full command of her role as the Queen of the Night.
Theodora
A highlight of the Handel commemorative year (250th anniversary of death) was the Salzburg Festival’s first-ever staging of Handel’s oratorio “Theodora” of 1750. Christof Loy, who was voted “director of the year” three times by the prestigious journal “Opernwelt”, created a production that is, in his words, “almost as an installation”, and groups his characters around the remains of a gigantic organ in situations that echo the libretto’s tragic dilemma of love, faith and virtue. His concept is supported by the vigorous Ivor Bolton and the Freiburger Barockorchester playing on original instruments, the Salzburger Bachchor, and, above all, by a fine cast. It is led by the luminous Christine Schäfer as a Theodora who “perfectly encapsulates the heroine’s combination of fragility and defiance” (AFP), and countertenor Bejun Mehta, who “excels as Theodora’s lover Didymus” (The New York Times).
Die Entführung aus dem Serail (Mozart 22)
The plot couldn’t be simpler: the Spanish nobleman Belmonte must free his fiancée Konstanze, her English maid Blonde and Belmonte’s servant Pedrillo from the clutches of the Turkish Bassa, or Pasha, Selim. Belmonte must sneak into the pasha’s seraglio and sneak back out again, all the while eluding and outsmarting Osmin, the overseer of the harem. With his Salzburg production of 2003, young Norwegian director Stefan Herheim raised a storm of controversy that continued to crackle in 2006, when the production was revised for the Mozart 22 cycle. The controversy was largely due to the fact that Herheim transposed the events to the inner world of the human psyche. The harem is no longer a real harem, but a psychological place of longing and desire, enticing and yet threatening at the same time. The entire exotic, Janissary scenery gives way to the more familiar images of one’s own sexual urges and impulses. The production revolves around the question: how does a man get a woman? To get to the bottom of this age-old question, Herheim shows how men and women try to seek happiness together and fail since they are caught in conventions and subservient to their inner demons – illustrated here by Osmin as priest and devil. “It is a genesis, the beginning of all beginnings, when man is separated into two sexes, is disoriented, and from then on seeks to return to his original form in ever new constellations,” explains Herheim. Giving powerful accounts of their difficult roles is a top-notch cast dominated by Laura Aikin as Konstanze and Charles Castronovo as Belmonte. With her elegiac Andante arias, Aikin is an oasis of calm and nobility. Castronovo suggests his own vulnerability with his wonderfully lyrical timbre. At the head of the Mozarteum Orchestra, Ivor Bolton once again confirms his reputation as a dynamic and sensitive interpreter of Baroque and Classical operas. The clarity and wisdom of his music-making provide an astute contrast to the turbulent activity on stage. Indeed, the marriage of orchestra and voices evokes the image of the stage of life: on the surface, everything is in motion; below, order rules – but it is an order that is often lost in everyday life.
Zaide & Adama (Mozart 22)
An abducted beauty in a harem, a noble rescuer from Europe, a merciless Muslim ruler – aren’t these the ingredients for Mozart’s “Die Entführung aus dem Serail”? Yes, but not only. They are also found in the fragment of a “Turkish” opera that Mozart wrote shortly before the “Entführung,” a work that was later given the title “Zaide.” The fragmentary nature and splendid music of “Zaide” have long stimulated enterprising artists to attempt completions or collages to make the work performable. For the Mozart 22 project, Salzburg Festival director Peter Ruzicka commissioned the Israeli composer Chaya Czernowin to produce a new work that stage director Claus Guth would then interweave with the “Zaide” fragment. In “Zaide” we have two lovers, Zaide and Gomatz, held prisoner in a harem in an imaginary past, somewhere in the Middle East… In “Adama” we have two lovers, a Woman and a Man, caught in the irreconcilable religious and political conflicts of today’s Middle East. Mozart’s themes are imprisonment, doomed love, culture clash and despotism; Czernowin’s are the same, but transported into our time. She tells of the love between an Israeli woman and a Palestinian man, a partnership doomed to fail in a world torn by violence. Czernowin approached her task with great reverence for Mozart’s work. ” Adama establishes a counterpoint to Zaide’s plot,” she says. “My contributions to this new ‘complete work’ are not traditional arias, but often fragments, musical pieces that are cut in the middle. […] Mozart’s excerpts alternate with elements from Adama and sometimes overlap as well: then the two scores are almost synchronized. In that sense, Adama is a mirror of Mozart’s Zaide.” While Ivor Bolton entices a fresh and spirited rendition of the Mozart score from the Mozarteum Orchestra in the pit, Johannes Kalitzke and the Österreichisches Ensemble für Neue Musik give a sharp and precise reading of “Adama” at the back of the stage. An outstanding cast gives performances of equal dramatic and vocal strength. Commenting on this experiment’s place in the Mozart 22 project, the Financial Times’ Shirley Apthorp declared that “Zaide – Adama stands out for its bold originality.”
La Finta Giardiniera (Mozart 22)
“My opera … was such a success that it is impossible for me to describe the applause to Mamma,” wrote Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart to his mother from Munich on 14 January 1775, the day after the premiere of his new opera buffa, “La finta giardiniera” (The Make-Believe Gardener) K. 196. Written for the Munich carnival season, it is not only the first example of a combination of buffa and seria roles in Mozart’s music, but it also carries its plot of pretense, disguise and surprising revelations to the brink of catastrophe. Belfiore believes he has killed his betrothed, Violante, in a fit of jealousy. He flees in panic – which does not prevent him from falling for Arminda, who then spurns her admirer Ramiro in favor of Belfiore. Violante, meanwhile, searches for her lover with her servant Roberto. Under a false name, she takes a post as gardener on the estate of Don Anchise; her servant passes himself off as her cousin. While Anchise pursues Violante, Roberto romances the maid. The labyrinth of pursuit and deception becomes completely entangled when Belfiore, his new conquest Arminda and her persistent admirer Ramiro turn up on the estate… The Mozart 22 production of “La finta giardiniera” was placed in the hands of Doris Dörrie, a noted filmmaker (“Men”) and, more recently, director of controversial opera productions (“Rigoletto” in Munich). Asked why she set the work in a garden center, Dörrie replied: “It’s a market of emotions! The plants represent feelings, the garden is our little paradise. […] We all have the same dream …, which is why we buy so much equipment, chemicals, even weapons to keep our garden under control. It must be kept in its boundaries, for just as an uncontrolled garden can mutate into a wild jungle, so can uncontrolled emotions, proliferating like wild plants, become dangerous to us.” The rousing musical underpinnings of this irreverent production are provided by the Mozarteum Orchestra under its principal conductor Ivor Bolton, who has made a name for himself as champion of authentic and spirited interpretations of Handel, Monteverdi, Gluck and, of course, Mozart. In this performance of “La finta giardiniera,” Bolton makes it clear that the real dramatic development in this early work is to be found in Mozart’s music.
Jan Vogler plays Schumann
Jan Vogler presents a revealing reading of Schumann’s Cello Concerto in A minor, Op. 129 with his own orchestra, the Dresden Festival Orchestra, that consists of more than 50 members from Europe’s most renowned early music ensembles, under the baton of its musical director Ivor Bolton. Exploring Schumann’s “original sound”, Jan Vogler plays on gut strings and the orchestra on period instruments. The concerto connects the Dresden Music Festival and its orchestra to the productive Dresden period of Schumann’s work (1844-50) since Schumann composed the cello concerto immediately after he had left the city.
Kulturpalast Dresden: Festive Re-Opening 2017
One of Dresden’s most important concert halls was reopened with a concert performed by Festspielorchester Dresden after a three-and-a-half-year hiatus for the hall’s reconstruction. Following this reconstruction, the landmarked Kulturpalast, located in the heart of Dresden, offers optimal spatial and acoustic conditions for the first time in its nearly 150-year history. The concert of the Festspielorchester Dresden under the direction of Ivor Bolton featured works by Weber, Beethoven, and Schumann; the soloists were Nicola Benedetti, Alexander Melnikov, and Jan Vogler.