“The whole world is a jest, man was born a great jester…” So goes the brilliant conclusion to Verdi’s Falstaff, an opera inspired by Shakespeare’s beloved comedy The Merry Wives of Windsor. The virtuosic score requires a particularly talented cast, not to mention a truly exceptional conductor. Herbert von Karajan perfectly fits the bill, and this performance featuring the Wiener Philharmoniker and an all-star group of singers is clearly worthy of Verdi’s powerful work, a masterpiece whose comic facade thinly veils the complex and sometimes even tragic characters’ struggles.
Das Rheingold
It began with a scandal, became the object of heated discussions, turned into a sensational success and finally blossomed into a legendary, standard setting production: Pierre Boulez’ and Patrice Chéreau’s epoch-making “Ring” cycle in Bayreuth, the “Centennial Ring”. When the production was premiered in 1976, there were brawls in the venerable Festspielhaus, with the audience divided into one mob roaring in favor and one screaming against. The main reason for the protests was Chéreau, who set the work in the time in which it was written and focused on the all-too-human passions that motivate gods and men alike. The grimy industrial era with its robber barons and suffering masses supplied the ideological underpinnings of Chéreau’s concept. Musical conservatives felt betrayed and cheapened by this association. The tide began to turn in 1977. Certain features were altered and the production began to have a more homogeneous feel. Finally, in 1980, its last year, the Ring concluded with a 90-minute ovation and 110 curtain calls. By the time Philips released the complete recording of this production in 1992, its legendary status had already begun to take shape: “Patrice Chéreau and Pierre Boulez not only wrote a major new chapter in Wagner interpretation with their Ring, but also carried out a revolution that affected all of musical theater. Since then, no production of the Ring has been able to come near to the concept put forward by Chéreau and Boulez.” (FonoForum) Unitel’s production, the first complete recording on film of Wagner’s Ring, marked the beginning of Unitel’s exclusive association with the Bayreuth Festival.
Der Rosenkavalier
Herbert von Karajan began conducting operas at the age of 21, and continued doing so throughout the rest of his long and prestigious career. A great admirer of Richard Strauss’s music, Karajan’s interpretation of Rosenkavalier demonstrates reveals his great familiarity with the work as well as hinting at the pleasure he took in conducting the work. His creative team, including Anna Tomowa-Sintow, Kurt Moll, Agnes Baltsa, Gottfried Hornik, Janet Perry, and Heinz Zednik, remains to this day one of the most spectacular solo distributions the work has ever enjoyed. Legendary for his rigorous approach to rehearsing and performing, the maestro took on the roles of artistic director, music director, and even became involved in certain aspects of filming.
Siegfried
It began with a scandal, became the object of heated discussions, turned into a sensational success and finally blossomed into a legendary, standard setting production: Pierre Boulez’ and Patrice Chéreau’s epoch-making “Ring” cycle in Bayreuth, the “Centennial Ring”. When the production was premiered in 1976, there were brawls in the venerable Festspielhaus, with the audience divided into one mob roaring in favor and one screaming against. The main reason for the protests was Chéreau, who set the work in the time in which it was written and focused on the all-too-human passions that motivate gods and men alike. The grimy industrial era with its robber barons and suffering masses supplied the ideological underpinnings of Chéreau’s concept. Musical conservatives felt betrayed and cheapened by this association. The tide began to turn in 1977. Certain features were altered and the production began to have a more homogeneous feel. Finally, in 1980, its last year, the Ring concluded with a 90-minute ovation and 110 curtain calls. By the time Philips released the complete recording of this production in 1992, its legendary status had already begun to take shape: “Patrice Chéreau and Pierre Boulez not only wrote a major new chapter in Wagner interpretation with their Ring, but also carried out a revolution that affected all of musical theater. Since then, no production of the Ring has been able to come near to the concept put forward by Chéreau and Boulez.” (FonoForum) Unitel’s production, the first complete recording on film of Wagner’s Ring, marked the beginning of Unitel’s exclusive association with the Bayreuth Festival.
Das Land des Lächelns
Franz Lehár (1870-1948) was incontestably one of the foremost masters of the operetta. He abounded in creative ideas, was a supreme craftsman, a temperamental musician whose artistry flowed in his blood, and a dramatist who succeeded in breathing genuine life into the hackneyed figures of the operetta genre. His most popular operettas were premiered between 1925 and 1929. These were the works whose wealth of ideas and emotionally florid, sometimes even sentimental, melodies brought them greater fame than the brilliant early works such as “The Count of Luxembourg” (1909) and “Gypsy Love” (1910) – save for “The Merry Widow” (1905), his most popular operetta of all. The works of this second creative period were also conceived with one particular singer in mind: Richard Tauber. The most typical works of this period are “Paganini” (1925), “The Czarevitch” (1927), “Friederike” (1928) and “Das Land des Lächelns” (1929). Among Lehár’s later operettas, “Das Land des Lächelns” has been particularly successful. It revels in color and rhythmic liveliness and the peculiar harmonies and melodies echo the exoticism of the Chinese setting.
From the House of the Dead
From the Salzburg Festival 1992
Based on Dostoevsky’s ‘diary’ of his years as a political detainee, Janácek’s singular opera, with ist profoundly disturbing, but ultimately uplifting, message about the human condition, is set in a nineteenth-century Siberian prison camp. This Salzburg Festival production by Klaus-Michael Grüber graphically depicts the grinding tedium of life in this penal colony. A superb cast is headed by the great Bulgarian bass Nicolai Ghiaurov, and Claudio Abbado conducts the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra in a performance hailed as a musical triumph. (Sung in the original Czech version)
Lulu
Alban Berg’s opera ‘Lulu’ is the story of a lower-class girl who sleeps her way to fame and fortune before losing everything she has and finding death at the hands of Jack the Ripper. Conductor Marc Albrecht supports the two main protagonists, Patricia Petibon’s Lulu and Michael Volle’s Dr. Schön, with the rich sonorities of Berg’s music. Particularly impressive are the gigantic backdrops that dominate the stage and were painted by Daniel Richter, one of the leading German artists of our time.