Wagner’s early opera is stylistically closer to Meyerbeer and bel canto than to his later works. Director Philipp Stölzl, who started his career with video clips for Rammstein and Madonna and later turned to directing films (“North Face”, “Goethe!”) and opera, sets the story of the rise and fall of a charismatic medieval Roman leader in the 20th century. “One can make surprising analogies to the despots of this time: Stalin, Mussolini, Hitler, Ceausescu “, says Stölzl. Torsten Kerl is a brilliant Rienzi; his sister Irene, sung by Camilla Nylund with lyrical intensity, is paired with a lover, Adriano, who is performed by the luminous mezzo Kate Aldrich. Also worthy of praise is the chorus, which masters its demanding part with presence and precision.
Medea in Corinto
Giovanni Simone Mayr’s “Medea in Corinto” is “the most absolutely amazing opera discovery in decades” (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung). Mayr, born in Germany in 1763, became one of the most important composers of Italian opera between Mozart and Rossini. At the Bavarian State Opera, director Hans Neuenfels stages this tragedy of betrayed love, lust for power and murderous hatred as a fascinating political thriller. Providing a vigorous orchestral support for soprano Nadja Michael as Medea and Ramón Vargas as her ex-husband Giasone, conductor Ivor Bolton plumbs the depths of Mayr’s rich score.
Rusalka
This highly acclaimed production from the Bayerische Staatsoper was a veritable sensation and a double revelation. That of the powerful and fascinating re-interpretation of Antonín Dvo?ák’s fairy-tale opera “Rusalka” and that of the young, up-and-coming Latvian soprano, Kristine Opolais, whose performance was hailed by the press as “one of the most vivid and striking accomplishments seen on an opera stage in a long time” (Vienna’s daily “Der Standard”). With her velvety soprano, her captivating beauty and her tremendous stage presence, Opolais perfectly embodies the role of the water nymph who becomes a human in order to find love, but loses all hope when her prince is seduced by a sensual princess.
Die Liebe der Danae
The rarely performed opera “Die Liebe der Danae” is a feast for Strauss lovers, with arias, ensembles and orchestral interludes blazing with sumptuous colors and rich textures. Written under war clouds and completed in 1940, it is the swan song of an aged composer who is taking leave from the world on the eve of the catastrophe that will engulf it. This timeless production from the Deutsche Oper Berlin can be seen as the mirror of a changing world order, with a wonderfully suggestive symbol dominating the stage during all three acts: a grand piano suspended upside-down from the rafters.
Roberto Devereux
London, 1601: love, desire and a death sentence at the English royal court – an ideal combination for an Italian grand opera. And Gaetano Donizetti’s Roberto Devereux could hardly be grander or more fit for a queen. The ideal showcase for Edita Gruberova! The prima donna assoluta of bel canto triumphs in this rarely performed work. In Christof Loy’s production at Munich’s National Theater, Edita Gruberova sings the role of Queen Elizabeth I. Friedrich Haider conducts the chorus and orchestra of the Bavarian State Opera; the HDTV recording is directed by Emmy award winner Brian Large.
Alice in Wonderland
Ravel, Handel, Elgar, Stravinsky, a snippet of Puccini’s ‘Turandot,’ a bassclarinet homage to George Gershwin, glissandi, hints of musicals, film music and Gilbert & Sullivan – Unsuk Chin is a master of stylistic parody, but also much more than that: she is clearly at home on every highway and byway of music history. Yet the musical house she constructs with the building blocks of the past and the present is definitely her own house, which she has designed and which self-assuredly proclaims her unmistakable individuality and style. Director Achim Freyer, whose productions have been setting standards for decades, sees Chin’s opera as a collection of ‘dream sequences,’ for which he has created imaginary spaces: with the help of pulleys, acrobats depict the magical characters of Alice’s world and suggest the action through pantomime, and with the help of colorful masks and props.
Khovanshchina
Even if Modest Mussorgsky left his opera ‘Khovanshchina’ (The Khovansky Affair) incomplete and unorchestrated, the sheer theatricality of its musical text reveals the presence of a work that begs for a stage production. The first completion and orchestration was made by Mussorgsky’s contemporary Rimsky-Korsakov, but the more slender, powerful, raw orchestration made by Dmitri Shostakovich in 1960 is the one preferred today, and the version chosen by Kent Nagano for the Munich production recorded here. With his stripped-down sets and historicizing costumes, director Dmitri Tcherniakov, one of the new voices of contemporary Russian theater, throws a bridge to the political present. The historical pessimism of the opera, says Tcherniakov, ‘is legitimated by Russian history and Russian life. Basically, nothing has changed.’
The Gambler (Der Spieler)
‘The Gambler’ is a dark study of human failings and the corruptive power of money. In this work, everyone gambles: the hero Alexey, the General and even the wealthy aunt Babulenka gamble with money; Blanche, the Marquis and Polina – who loves Alexey – gamble with their fellow human beings. The results are humiliation, ruin and self-delusion. But when the Staatskapelle Berlin under worldfamous conductor Daniel Barenboim provide the orchestral sound to the full, lustrous voices of Vladimir Ognovenko, Kristine Opolais, Misha Didyk, Stefania Toczyska and their colleagues, there is nothing even remotely dismal about the opera or its production. Directed by Dmitri Tcherniakov, ‘the evening zips past entertainingly, yet leaves its traces in the listener’s mind: a stroke of genius like Prokofiev’s opera itself’ (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung).
Die Kluge
A Village: Romeo and Juliet (Romeo und Julia auf dem Dorfe)
Based on the novella “The People of Seldwyla” by Gottfried Keller, this opera was written in 1901 and first performed in German at Berlin’s Komische Oper on 21 February 1907. Its first English-language production was given in London on 22 February 1910. Frederick Delius (1862-1934) obtained his first successes in Germany. He numbers among the late-Romantic composers in the line of Richard Strauss and Gustav Mahler. The dramatic weightiness and heroic sweep of these composers is, however, missing in Delius’s music, which is more dream-like and limpid, as in the well-known “Walk to Paradise Garden”, an intermezzo from the opera “A Village Romeo and Juliet”. Delius’s most important opera, it radiates a fairy-tale atmosphere similar to that found in Pfitzner and Humperdinck.