The reigning queen of bel canto, Edita Gruberova has laid the cornerstone for a new ‘Norma’ legend in her first stage performance of this virtuoso role. The premiere of Vincenzo Bellini’s opera at the Bavarian State Opera in Munich marked a resounding new triumph in the singer’s career. Sharing the stage with Gruberova were Zoran Todorovich, Roberto Scandiuzzi, Sonia Ganassi and other renowned soloists, along with the chorus of the Bavarian State Opera. Friedrich Haider conducted the production directed by Jürgen Rose.
Un Ballo in Maschera
Praise for the Bayerische Staatsoper’s new Ballo in maschera: “A formidable vocal feast” (Bayerische Staatszeitung). Ten years after stepping down as music director of the Bavarian State Opera, a “grand Zubin Mehta“ (Bayerischer Rundfunk) 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, miraculously guiding his orchestra and unsurpassable voices the way a thermal lifts a paraglider … Musically the performance was a dream” (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung). “A total triumph” (La Razón). “This production shows what a utopia opera can be” (Abendzeitung).
Alceste
The Belgian dancer and choreographer Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui interprets Gluck’s late Baroque opera Alceste as an impressive symbiosis between dance and music. The opera “can be experienced here in all its existential power.“ (SZ) It is here performed in the revised Paris version from 1776 where Gluck has revalued especially the ballet music. Cherkaoui – director of the Royal Ballet of Flanders – has worked with top artists across disciplines like superstar Beyoncé. The superb dancers of the Belgian Compagnie Eastman, Antwerp perform Gluck’s score physically, creating a fine and stringent aesthetics of “beautiful images” (Opernwelt). Dorothea Röschmann with her “inimitable charisma” (Financial Times) and Charles Castronovo deliver a brilliant performance in the roles of the self-sacrificing royal couple. “Musically impressive.“ (NMZ)
Rusalka
This highly acclaimed production from the Bayerische Staatsoper, a powerful and fascinating re-interpretation of Dvorák’s fairy-tale opera Rusalka, was a revelation: the young, up-and-coming Latvian soprano, Kristine Opolais, whose performance was rightly hailed by the press as “one of the most vivid and striking accomplishments seen on an opera stage in a long time” (Vienna’s leading daily Der Standard). With her supple and velvety soprano voice, her captivating physical beauty and her hauntingly moving stage presence, Kristine Opolais perfectly embodies the role of the water nymph who becomes a human being in order to find love.
Un Ballo in Maschera
Praise for the Bayerische Staatsoper’s new Ballo in maschera: “A formidable vocal feast” (Bayerische Staatszeitung). Ten years after stepping down as music director of the Bavarian State Opera, a “grand Zubin Mehta“ (Bayerischer Rundfunk) 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, miraculously guiding his orchestra and unsurpassable voices the way a thermal lifts a paraglider … Musically the performance was a dream” (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung). “A total triumph” (La Razón). “This production shows what a utopia opera can be” (Abendzeitung).
Mefistofele
Best-known today as the librettist of Verdi’s final Shakespearean masterpieces, Otello and Falstaff, the multitalented Arrigo Boito was also a fine composer in his own right. Hugely ambitious in scope, and some 20 years in the making, his first (and only completed) opera, Mefistofele, sets out to encompass nothing less than the whole of Goethe’s vast poetic drama Faust (part I and II), and is considered the very central work of his phase between Verdi and Puccini. Making his debut at the Bayerische Staatsoper, director Roland Schwab (a protégé of the legendary Ruth Berghaus) plays devil’s advocate by setting the opera in a nightmarish atmosphere. “The exceptional solistic cast” (ORF) features René Pape, Joseph Calleja, Kristine Opolais and Karine Babajanyan.
Tristan & Isolde
There can be no half-measures with Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde: every performance demands supreme commitment, and that’s what it receives in this 1998 production from the Bavarian State Opera. No city has a longer Tristan pedigree than Munich, but Peter Konwitschny’s inventive updated staging is liberated rather than inhibited by that tradition. It’s a bold setting for a truly magnificent cast, and Gramophone described Waltraud Meier’s Isolde as “riveting”. Jon Frederic West, Kurt Moll and Marjana Lipvosek match her for intensity. With Zubin Mehta conducting and the Bavarian State Orchestra on radiant form, this is some of the finest Wagner singing – and playing – of its era.
Making of “Rusalka”
Making of “Idomeneo”
War and Peace
This ‘War and Peace’ will go down as a milestone in Jurowski’s tenure at the State Opera, and in Tcherniakov’s often divisive career. They rise to meet the moment, overcoming the work’s near untenability not only to argue for its place in the canon, but also to use it as a vehicle for a passionate statement against Russian nationalism.” (The New York Times) Prokofiev’s opera War and Peace is one of the monumental works in opera history and rarely performed because of its sheer violence and complexity: More than 70 characters are cast for this four-hour opera, which is based on Tolstoy’s masterpiece. With the appropriate preparation time, the Bayerische Staatsoper, one of the world’s top opera houses, has taken on this major work under the baton of its general music director Vladimir Jurowski and staged by Dmitri Tcherniakov, one of the most celebrated directors and born and raised in Russia – at the same time an expert on the subject.