Alban Berg’s final opera Lulu is like nothing else in 20th-century theatre. A psychodrama of a woman and her sexuality in a corrupt (and corrupting) world, it’s set to music of shattering power and iridescent sensuality; an opera to disturb and seduce in equal measure. This 2001 staging from Zurich Opera made a powerful impression on critics at the time, with soprano Laura Aikin compelling as the morally ambivalent heroine, and Franz Welser-Möst drawing lustrous playing from the orchestra. Director Sven-Erich Bechtolf, meanwhile, calls on pop culture and Weimar cabaret to explore the dark underbelly of an opera that never gets any less compelling.
Salzburg Festival 2012: Die Soldaten
Bernd Alois Zimmermann’s opera Die Soldaten (The Soldiers), the “highlight of the festival season” (Süddeutsche Zeitung), breaks all records! The style and structure of an opera, acknowledged as one of the 20th century’s key works, its musical and dramatic collage technique take it to the limits of what is playable. Now, in Salzburg’s Felsenreitschule, the opera has found the ideal performance venue and, with the Vienna Philharmonic under Ingo Metzmacher together with a top-flight cast of singers, ist ideal performers too.
Die Entführung aus dem Serail (Mozart 22)
The plot couldn’t be simpler: the Spanish nobleman Belmonte must free his fiancée Konstanze, her English maid Blonde and Belmonte’s servant Pedrillo from the clutches of the Turkish Bassa, or Pasha, Selim. Belmonte must sneak into the pasha’s seraglio and sneak back out again, all the while eluding and outsmarting Osmin, the overseer of the harem. With his Salzburg production of 2003, young Norwegian director Stefan Herheim raised a storm of controversy that continued to crackle in 2006, when the production was revised for the Mozart 22 cycle. The controversy was largely due to the fact that Herheim transposed the events to the inner world of the human psyche. The harem is no longer a real harem, but a psychological place of longing and desire, enticing and yet threatening at the same time. The entire exotic, Janissary scenery gives way to the more familiar images of one’s own sexual urges and impulses. The production revolves around the question: how does a man get a woman? To get to the bottom of this age-old question, Herheim shows how men and women try to seek happiness together and fail since they are caught in conventions and subservient to their inner demons – illustrated here by Osmin as priest and devil. “It is a genesis, the beginning of all beginnings, when man is separated into two sexes, is disoriented, and from then on seeks to return to his original form in ever new constellations,” explains Herheim. Giving powerful accounts of their difficult roles is a top-notch cast dominated by Laura Aikin as Konstanze and Charles Castronovo as Belmonte. With her elegiac Andante arias, Aikin is an oasis of calm and nobility. Castronovo suggests his own vulnerability with his wonderfully lyrical timbre. At the head of the Mozarteum Orchestra, Ivor Bolton once again confirms his reputation as a dynamic and sensitive interpreter of Baroque and Classical operas. The clarity and wisdom of his music-making provide an astute contrast to the turbulent activity on stage. Indeed, the marriage of orchestra and voices evokes the image of the stage of life: on the surface, everything is in motion; below, order rules – but it is an order that is often lost in everyday life.
Salzburg Festival: L’Upupa – The Hoopoe and the Triumph of Filial Love
The world premiere of Hans Werner Henze’s opera, recorded live at the Salzburg Festival in 2003. The libretto is based on an old Syrian fairy tale concerning three rulers, three sons and three treasures. Matthias Goerne leads an international cast including Laura Aikin, John Mark Ainsley, Alfred Muff and Hanna Schwarz. Markus Stenz conducts the Wiener Philharmoniker.
The Infernal Comedy
The stage-play for a Baroque-Orchestra, two Sopranos and one actor is based on the real-life story of Jack Unterweger, a notorious womanizer and celebrated author and journalist, who was suspected of killing prostitutes in Vienna, Graz, Prague and Los Angeles; later vanished from Vienna, fled into the U.S., got arrested in Miami, transferred to Austria, accused and finally committed suicide after being convicted of homicide in eleven cases.