The successful duo of Jossi Wieler und Sergio Morabito have rediscovered a Baroque gem in Niccolò Jommelli’s opera Il Vologeso. Their exciting staging, relocated to the present day, delighted both the audience and the press. Born in Naples in 1714, Niccolò Jommelli was in his day a superstar among composers. In the course of his life he set some 80 librettos. For this, the first staged performance of Il Vologeso for more than 200 years, a strong cast has been assembled. Sebastian Kohlhepp, Sophie, Ana Durlovski, Helene Schneiderman and Catriona Smith all bring the story of Vologeso to life again with their captivating and beautiful singing. Gabriele Ferro, conducting the State Orchestra, transforms Jommelli’s music into great waves of emotion with his differentiated and thrilling conducting style.
Mefistofele
Making his debut at the Bayerische Staatsoper with Munich’s first ever staging of Boito’s masterpiece, director Roland Schwab (a protégé of the legendary Ruth Berghaus) plays devil’s advocate by setting the opera in what looks like a garbage-strewn nightclub that then transforms into a geriatric hospital ward, by way of a drunken detour to Munich’s own Oktoberfest. Is Hell, then, simply the hell-on-earth that passes for the modern world? Singing “with clear, strong bass lines” (Deutschlandradio Kultur), René Pape plays Mephistopheles as the sardonic leader of a satanic cult. As Faust, his slave, tenor Joseph Calleja “hits his high notes with formidable vigour” (Financial Times). Latvian soprano Kristine Opolais’s Margherita “shines with understated Grace Kelly elegance” (Opera Today), in the pit, Israeli conductor Omer Meir Wellber.
The Tsar’s Bride
Musical director Daniel Barenboim started off the season 2013 / 2014 at the Staatsoper Berlin with a new production ‘Die Zarenbraut’ by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, staged by multi-awarded young Russian director Dmitri Tcherniakov, who has been among the opera stage directors most in demand worldwide ever since his staging of Boris Godunov with Staatsoper Unter den Linden in 2005.
Verdi, Il Trovatore
He was trained to be a stage designer in the Münchner Kammerspiele. He became famous for his video clips for Rammstein and Madonna. His directing of the films ‘North Face’ and ‘Young Goethe in Love’ took him to Hollywood level. As an opera director, Philipp Stölzl, now tackled his first Verdi: ‘Il trovatore’ with a cast of high-class singer including Anna Netrebko als Leonora and Plácido Domingo as Count Luna – both of them making their debut in these roles. Daniel Barenboim conducts the Staatskapelle Berlin.
Janácek, Jenufa
“Sometimes all that is needed is to match the right director with the right piece: Christof Loy and Janácek’s Jenufa are evidently just such a happy case, giving the Deutsche Oper Berlin the rare example of an opera production as intelligent as it is modern” (Opernglas). Jenufa, still Janácek’s most successful and most often performed opera, is a musical study of the social milieu. The psychologically precise role management of Christof Loy (“exemplary”, said the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung) results in “a staging with an authentically tragic aura” (NY Times).
Monteverdi Cycle from Berlin: Orpheus
Monteverdi’s La Favola d’Orfeo is acknowledged as the very first opera, his three surviving complete operas are accordingly right at the start of operatic history, and yet Berlin’s Komische Oper has succeeded in making these three works “so modern and thrilling” that, as Bayerischer Rundfunk said, “the 400 intervening years sometimes seemed to have been eliminated”. In a stage production by Barrie Kosky and a new instrumentation by the Tashkent-born, internationally successful composer Elena Kats-Chernin, conductor André de Ridder presents a brilliantly selected ensemble, comprising 32 soloists and a supporting cast of over 200. The electrifying curtain-raiser is Orpheus, compelling as a rich feast of the senses in a lush blooming stage Arcadia, peopled by a fantastic company of nymphs and satyrs. Amid joyful song and captivating dance interludes, the mythical singer’s passionate young love for Eurydice blossoms till its tragic end at her death.
Monteverdi Cycle from Berlin: Odysseus
Odysseus on is a character study with moving moments. A man weary of wandering and a waiting wife at home long for one another, only to find it hard to approach each other again after years of separation.
Monteverdi Cycle from Berlin: Poppea
The highlight of the idiosyncratic orchestration and direction comes in Poppea with a glorification of immorality that is almost unbelievable from a composer who was a priest. In a bleak rocky landscape, the innocence of Arcadian love is perverted into naked lust, degraded to an unrestrained exercise of brutality and arbitrary power.
Alceste
Performed on the occasion of the official reopening of the Anna Amalia Library in Weimar in 2007, the sparing production of Anton Schweitzer’s Alceste (1773) by Hendrik Müller concentrates on the chamber-like interplay of the four lead roles. Alceste’s demanding, coloratura-filled parts are mastered with grace and seemingly effortless ease by all singers. In the lead role as the wife who sacrifices herself to save her beloved husband, Simone Schneider combines delicacy with dazzling technique, and harmonizes superbly with internationally acclaimed
Cyndia Sieden as Parthenia.
Lucrezia Borgia
The phenomenal Edita Gruberova, the world’s undisputed Queen of bel canto, proves once again why she deserves this title: following he tumultuously applauded concert debut as Lucrezia Borgia in Barcelona, her mesmerizing role debut in a staged version of this work took place at the Bavarian State Opera and was acclaimed just as frenetically, and rightly so. Her performance, noted ‘Opera Magazine’, ‘vindicated the Munich audience’s near-idolization of her’. With ‘Lucrezia Borgia’, Gruberova follows up her recent triumphs in ‘Roberto Devereux’ and ‘Norma’ with another bel canto masterwork.