Six years before Rigoletto, Giuseppe Verdi had already composed a gripping drama about love and revenge: Ernani – his breakthrough as a composer. The opera was also based on a play by the French author Victor Hugo, whose text inspired Verdi’s unique style with moving arias, stirring choruses and scenes of high drama: Elvira is desired by three men – among them the Spanish king and her old uncle. But she loves the robber Ernani, of all people, who has a score to settle with the king… “As much as this brilliant and precisely executed evening is always one over, it cleverly always moves just below the caricature threshold. Scurrilous drama, bizarre humour and splatter comedy serve only one thing: the unmasking of the guys.” (Münchner Merkur); “A mixture of Tarantino’s ‘Kill Bill’ and Monty Python’s ‘The Knights of the Coconut’.” (Deutschlandfunk)
Iolanta and the Nutcracker
When Tchaikovsky premiered his famous ballet The Nutcracker in Saint Petersburg 130 years ago, it was presented as a double bill, as standard at the time, together with the opera Iolanta. The Volksoper Wien, being part home to the famous Wiener Staatsballett, under the helm of the new music director Omer Meir Wellber decided to present both works again in one evening, but not as two separate pieces, but by fusing the two works into one. Iolanta is a blind princess. A famous doctor can cure her, but only after she is being told about her blindness. Her father doesn’t want to break that horrible news to her. Lotte de Beer: “In her blindness Iolanta lives with a magical imagination of everything that surrounds her. The Nutcracker music and the dancers of the Wiener Staatsballett show us Iolanta’s world perception by her inner eye. But there comes a time in life, when you have to decide whether to remain a blind princess or to see the world in all its imperfection.” This production plays on the cutting edge of fantasy and reality, of being a child and being a grown-up, of opera and dance. In short: it’s a family-show to the core.
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.