Donizetti’s La Favorite at the Bayerische Staatsoper comes up with a cast of outstanding belcanto singers: star mezzo-soprano Elina Garanca as seducing Léonor de Guzman (her very first stage role!), Matthew Polenzani as her desperate lover Fernand and Mariusz Kwiecien as King Alphonse. Amélie Niermeyer transforms the tragedy of the female role torn between spiritual and secular values into “a concentrated and intense drama […] with high acting quality” (Münchner Merkur). This contrast is highlighted by enormous architectural box structures that continually transport the characters between the convent and the royal palace, emphasizing the influence each party has on the current scene.
Un ballo in maschera
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).
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.
Verdi, La Forza del Destino
Ever since their magnificent and hugely successful performance in Wagner’s “Lohengrin” at the Bavarian State Opera, Anja Harteros and Jonas Kaufmann have come to be regarded as the world of opera’s perfect couple. In Giuseppe Verdi’s “La forza del destino”, the two returned and once again played two lovers desperately trying to be together but kept apart by the forces of destiny. Their performance at the Munich Opera Festival met with “explosive outbursts of applause for the new heights
reached in singing” (dpa).
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.