Ten years after stepping down as music director of the Bavarian State Opera, Zubin Mehta returned to Munich in March 2016 to celebrate his 80th birthday conducting Verdi’s masterpiece for the first time in a staged production. His cast features some of today’s finest Verdi singers: soprano Anja Harteros, singing Amelia for the first time and “filling every note with Verdian intensity”, tenor Piotr Beczala as a “visually and vocally dashing Riccardo” and George Petean as an “exemplary” Renato (Neue Musikzeitung). In director Johannes Erath’s musically super-sensitive new production, this historically-based tale of illicit love, conspiracy and betrayal unfolds in a surrealistic, shadowy setting transformed by lighting and projections. Special praise was showered by the enthusiastic critics on Maestro Mehta, who “creates concentrated musical connections (…) Musically the performance was a dream” (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung).
Bregenz Festival 2018: Beatrice Cenci
Church corruption, human violence & a daughter who plots revenge on her abusive father – Goldschmidt’s Beatrice Cenci has every ingredient for a gripping opera & the story of ist origins is equally fascinating albeit tragic: The Jewish composer, who fled Germany for London in 1935, was awarded a prize for his work, but the promised performance never took place. It was not until 1988 that it received ist premiere as a concert performance. At Bregenz, stage director Johannes Erath brought Beatrice Cenci on stage for the first time.
Il crepuscolo dei sogni
Music from operas by Henry Purcell, Verdi, Monteverdi, by Richard Strauss and Rossini, by Boito and other composers from over 200 years of music history. A so-called pastiche opera. The conductor is Omer Meir Wellber and the director is Johannes Erath. Soprano Carmen Giannattasio, baritone Markus Werba and bass Alexandros Stavrakakis sing on stage and in the stalls. The new season of Palermo’s Teatro Massimo opens with a completely new form of musical theatre. An opera vision – without a plot that is concrete at first glance, explains director Johannes Erath: “But of course there is a common thread. Not in the narrative sense, in the storytelling sense, but it’s more of an emotional journey, like a rollercoaster of emotions.” PRESS “A hymn to the empathic magnificence of opera” (La Repubblica) / “An unprecedented opening” (La Repubblica Palermo)