In his first year as Music Director of Valencia’s Palau de les Arts, the exciting young conductor Omer Meir Wellber scored a triumph with Tchaikovsky’s beloved opera Eugene Onegin. In Mariusz Trelinski’s timeless production, consisting of a series of surrealist tableaux of great suggestive beauty, he leads a dream team of rising opera stars headed by Artur Rucinski as Onegin and Kristine Opolais as Tatyana. “An ideally well-balanced vocal cast” (Die Welt).
Pique Dame
Stuttgart’s world renowned directing-duo, Jossi Wieler, Intendant of the Oper Stuttgart and the opera’s chief dramaturg Sergio Morabito, stage a new production of Tchaikovsky’s operatic masterwork Pique Dame. The production featuring Erin Caves as Hermann, Vladislav Sulimsky as Tomsky, Helene Schneiderman as the Countess and Rebecca von Lipinski as Lisa is conducted by Stuttgart’s musical director Sylvain Cambreling.
Il Vologeso
The successful duo of Jossi Wieler und Sergio Morabito have rediscovered a Baroque gem in Niccolò Jommelli’s opera Il Vologeso. Their exciting staging, relocated to the present day, delighted both the audience and the press. Born in Naples in 1714, Niccolò Jommelli was in his day a superstar among composers. In the course of his life he set some 80 librettos. For this, the first staged performance of Il Vologeso for more than 200 years, a strong cast has been assembled. Sebastian Kohlhepp, Sophie, Ana Durlovski, Helene Schneiderman and Catriona Smith all bring the story of Vologeso to life again with their captivating and beautiful singing. Gabriele Ferro, conducting the State Orchestra, transforms Jommelli’s music into great waves of emotion with his differentiated and thrilling conducting style.
Monteverdi Cycle from Berlin: Poppea
The highlight of the idiosyncratic orchestration and direction comes in Poppea with a glorification of immorality that is almost unbelievable from a composer who was a priest. In a bleak rocky landscape, the innocence of Arcadian love is perverted into naked lust, degraded to an unrestrained exercise of brutality and arbitrary power.