A feathered thief, a servant wrongly sentenced to death and a corrupt, power-hungry politician: those are the protagonists of Rossini’s semi-serious opera whose overture, with its drum rolls and oboe solo, is one of the best-known pieces in the history of music. La gazza ladra (The Thieving Magpie) is set in a time of great social upheaval. When Ninetta is accused of stealing a silver spoon, a series of unfortunate events begins that initially makes the happy ending expected from an opera semiseria seem highly unlikely. What sort of world is it where a person can be executed for the alleged theft of a spoon? Tobias Kratzer, successful as a director throughout Europe, now debuts in Vienna with Rossini’s opera that received its first performance in 1817 and traces the uncertainty felt by people in a politically and socially destabilised world. “To the left and right, drum rolls sound from the pit, then the ORF Radio Symphony Orchestra gets going, effervescent, grand, dense and dark, but at the same time filigree. [The Arnold Schoenberg Choir, Marina de Liso, Maxim Mironov, Fabio Capitanucci and all the others] “sing and play as if they had inhaled Kratzer’s idea of the highly lively, truthful play.” (Süddeutsche Zeitung)
Andris Nelsons conducts Mahler
Mahler’s unusually extended five-movement Symphony No. 7 is one of his most ambiguous and enigmatic and is therefore considered by many performers to be the most difficult. This recording is part of a Mahler cycle that Andris Nelsons, “one of the most celebrated conductors of our time” (Salzburger Nachrichten), and the Wiener Philharmoniker, the orchestra that Gustav Mahler himself conducted many times, have already been working on for a few years now and that will be continued for the next few years. Under Nelsons’ direction, the orchestra “performed magic in the Golden Hall. […] Magnificent strings, fabulous winds, accomplished melodic dialogues were heard in all five movements of the symphony. […] Rarely has one heard this work so finely chiselled, so dynamically balanced. An event.” (Kurier)
Il barbiere di Siviglia
“Il barbiere di Siviglia” is commonly considered as Gioachino Rossini’s masterpiece. It premiered in Rome in 1816, ever since it has been one of the most popular and successful works in the world of opera. For his new production at the Vienna State Opera, the director Herbert Fritsch has created a colourful slapstick party” (Der Standard) and assembled a gifted and dedicated ensemble of excellent vocal quality and marvelous acting skills, with Bel canto star Juan Diego Flórez as Conte Almaviva, Vasilisa Berzhanskaya as Rosina and Étienne Dupuis as Figaro. Rossini specialist Michele Mariotti sweeps the Orchester der Wiener Staatsoper into lusty playing.
Salzburg Easter Festival 2021: Mozart Requiem
Artistic director Christian Thielemann opens the Salzburg Easter Festival 2021 with Mozart’s Requiem. The excellent Bachelor Salzburg and a top-class quartet of soloists with Golda Schultz, Christa Mayer, Sebastian Kohlhepp and René Pape make the concert a dignified commemoration of the dead. “Mozart’s Requiem sounded at the highest level, with great balance and attention to well-dosed, rather restrained, even reverent sound architecture. Here one realised once again how wonderful it can be when conductor and musicians are so unconditionally attuned to each other.” Kurier. PROGRAM: Mozart Requiem K. 626
Wiener Philharmoniker & Welser-Möst: Mahler 9
An event – and not only for the listeners, but also for the orchestra as Philharmonic board member Daniel Froschauer emphasizes “This is an incredible work – really written for us. Mahler really pushes the limits in this piece!” Gustav Mahler and the Wiener Philharmoniker have indeed a very special relationship. Not only did the great composer, who was conductor and head of the Vienna State Opera, conduct the Wiener Philharmoniker regularly and – from 1898 to 1901 – even the famed Subscription Concert Series. The orchestra also premiered Mahler’s 9th Symphony in June 1912 – one year after the composer’s death. Bruno Walter conducted the world premiere, for this concert it is Austrian conductor Franz Welser-Möst, someone whom knows the orchestra better than most other conductors.
La Wally
Catalani’s masterpiece, first performed in 1892 at La Scala in Milan, is best known for its aria “Ebben? Ne andrò lontana”. With nuanced harmonies and colourful instrumentation, he pays great attention to the orchestra sound. He chose highly unusual material for his opera: the successful novel Die Geier-Wally by Wilhelmine von Hillern tells the story of a young woman who does not fit any of the gender clichés of the time. Unlike many earlier operatic heroines commanded to marry against their will, Wally does not look for a solution in society, but instead runs away to the mountains. Her husband must be her equal, someone unafraid to face both a bear and her father…
Giulio Cesare in Egitto
Triumphantly premiered in 1724 at the King’s Theatre in London, George Frideric Handel’s Giulio Cesare in Egitto masterfully combines human emotions: Triumph with sorrow, despair with happiness and love with profound melancholy in the face of the transience of all earthly life. Star director Keith Warner creates a production that imaginatively blends silent film and baroque opera, delightfully echoing Mankiewicz’s legendary Cleopatra with Elizabeth Taylor, Rex Harrison and Richard Burton. An excellent cast of singers is led by two of the world’s leading countertenors: Bejun Mehta and Christophe Dumaux. Louise Alder shines as the seductive Cleopatra. Patricia Bardon, Simon Bailey and Jake Arditti are further highlights in this extraordinary group of singers, while Ivor Bolton provides the appropriate soundtrack on the podium of the Concentus Musicus Wien. “Cheers for all involved” Kurier. “A must for baroque opera fans.” Kronen Zeitung
Bregenz Festival 2022: Siberia
It is a tremendous act of love when Stephana gives up her life as a mistress in an elegant St Petersburg palais to follow her true love Vassili to a Siberian prison camp. In this exile, Stephana turns into a fearless hero. For Umberto Giordano, who also composed Andrea Chénier and Fedora, Siberia is a universally applicable human drama despite its Russian local color: “Love and pain do not have a nationality”. Siberia premiered in 1903 in La Scala in Milan replacing Giacomo Puccini’s postponed Madama Butterfly. Two young artists from Moscow bring the stirring opus to the Festspielhaus: the internationally aspiring director Vasily Barkhatov and Valentin Uryupin, who already conducted Eugene Onegin in Bregenz. “Uryupin leads the agile Wiener Symphoniker through the score of Strauss’ contemporary Giordano with a feeling for delicately toned colours. Ambur Braid sings the demanding part of Stephana with bravura.” (FAZ)
Salzburg Festival 2022: Die Zauberflöte
Salzburg stands for Mozart and hardly any work stands for Mozart as much as his Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute), the most famous opera of all. Therefore, a staging of Die Zauberflöte at the Salzburg Festival is always something special. Director Lydia Steier in her revised version of her Salzburg production, now placed at the Haus für Mozart, introduces a grandfather as a narrator to read Die Zauberflöte as a bedtime story to his three grandchildren. In this way, the rich fantasy of the work breaks into the strict household of an upper middle-class family, in which reverie has little place, and takes the three boys right into the middle of the action. As the Three Boys, they plunge into a fairy-tale and dream world in whose surreal enlargements the boys’ everyday lives appear again and again. With a childlike gaze, they accompany and guide the protagonists through their destinies. “Regula Mühlemann is a beautiful-sounding Pamina, Michael Nagl a charming, creamy Papageno, and Tareq Nazmi as bass-strong Sarastro turns out to be a stroke of luck.” (Oberösterreichische Nachrichten)
Salzburg Festival 2022: Gianni Schicchi
In Gianni Schicchi, with its playful levity, peals of unbounded, strident laughter ring out – albeit of the kind that can only be heard in hell. We are in Florence, in the house of Buoso Donati, who has just died. Once the will has been found, his assembled kinsfolk – degenerate aristocrats – discover they have been deprived of their inheritance. After initial reluctance they bring themselves to seek assistance from an unpopular newcomer, the cunning Gianni Schicchi. He sets to work, ruthlessly turning the situation to his own advantage – not for nothing does he rage through Dante’s Inferno as a kind of sinister poltergeist. “Great opera cinema!”
Kronenzeitung