“Great moments: world premiere of Thomas Larcher’s opera ’Das Jagdgewehr’ at the Bregenz Festival.“ (Wiener Zeitung) Thomas Larcher has adapted Yasushi Inoue’s best-seller The Hunting Gun for his first opera, with a libretto by Austrian Book Prize winner Friederike Gösweiner. Austrian actor and film director Karl Markovics made his debut as stage director for an opera. The story tells of three women, who speak in three letters addressed to the same man, a hunter – his wife, his lover and his lover’s daughter. As the women react to the revelation of illicit love, the hunter’s life is laid bare. “The Austrian composer’s first opera is inventive” (The Times), “a clear, powerful text, some striking imagery and a luminous score of great beauty and originality ensure this opera’s success.“ (The Observer)
Ingo Metzmacher conducts Hans Werner Henze’s Requiem
Few modern composers had a more meaningful relationship with both past and (very real) present than Hans Werner Henze – or a more acute ear for beauty. His Requiem of 1993 is simultaneously typical and utterly original: nine wordless concertos for trumpet, piano and a shimmering chamber orchestra, each charged (in Henze’s own words) “with the human fears and problems of our time, with illness and death, love and loneliness”. This film captures the world premiere performance in Frankfurt in February 1993, with Ueli Wiget on piano and the incomparable Håkan Hardenberger on trumpet – a landmark in postwar musical history.
Modern Masterworks: John Cage
Few figures of 20th-century music were as innovative, iconoclastic and controversial as John Cage, a composer who asked fundamental about the nature of music and art. When he died in 1992, a festival of his music scheduled in Frankfurt took on the character of a celebration of his life and art. The performances featured here are drawn from that festival, with David Tudor – Cage’s friend and musical partner for over 40 years – performing two of the composer’s major concert works, accompanied by Ensemble Modern and conductor Ingo Metzmacher. The performances are preceded by an introduction to Cage and his work by Michael Nupen.
Die Gespenstersonate
In September 1984, as part of the Berlin Festival Week, the Deutsche Oper Berlin staged the world premiere of German composer Aribert Reimann’s opera “Die Gespenstersonate”. Based on the drama by the Swedish writer August Strindberg, the chamber opera tells the story of a student, who muses about the inhabitants of a fancy-looking house. His crucial meeting with the Old Man pulls him into a world of intrigues, sickness, depression and murder. It plays in and around the presumably haunted house, which seems to drown its inhabitants in its sinister atmosphere. Better known for his operas “Lear” or “Medea”, Reimann established himself firmly as a stage composer from 1965 onwards. “Die Gespenstersonate”, being a modern chamber opera, was performed not on the great stage of the Deutsche Oper Berlin, but at the smaller Hebbel-Theater. Heinz Lukas-Kindermann’s stage direction sets the spectator under its gloomy spell, the exquisite cast performing the demanding score stars Hans Günter Nöcker as the “Old Man” and David Knutson as the Student, as well as well-loved Martha Mödl as the “Mummy”.
Bregenz Festival 2018: The Hunting Gun
A world premiere at Bregenz Festival: Thomas Larcher has adapted Yasushi Inoue’s best-seller The Hunting Gun for his first opera, with a libretto by Austrian Book Prize winner Friederike Gösweiner. It tells the story of three women, who speak in three letters addressed to the same man, a hunter – his wife, his lover and his lover’s daughter. As the women react to the revelation of illicit love, the hunter’s life is laid bare. Award-winning Austrian actor and film director Karl Markovics gives his debut as stage director for an opera.