„In the midst of chaos, how do you find peace?“, is one of the pressing topical questions that Joyce DiDonato asks in her powerful work In War & Piece – Harmony through Music. The Grammy Award winning mezzo-soprano fashions an intense semi-theatricalized concert production, including works by George Frideric Handel and Henry Purcell. Organizing a set of Baroque arias along thematic lines, DiDonato contemplates the interwoven worlds of external conflict and serenity, internal war and peace, and the challenges which they provide for every citizen of the world. Together with the period-instrument ensemble Il Pomo d’Oro under Maxim Emelyanychev, the singer creates a dramatic atmosphere on the stage of the Gran Teatre del Liceu in Barcelona. In the music of Handel, DiDonato achieves a “purity that enhances the composer’s signature formula” (Washington Post).
Semele
A fulminant opening of the International Handel festival Karlsruhe, Floris Visser’s staging of George Frideric Handel’s musical drama Semele brings distinguished Handel specialists such as the Deutsche Händel-Solisten and the Händel Festspielchor together. Labelled a piece “after the manner of an oratorio”, the dazzling Semele fuses elements of opera, oratorio and classical drama.
Arminio
Max Emanuel Cencics celebrated and award winning production of Handel’s masterwork from the Internationale Händel Festspiele Karlsruhe. Described by one contemporary commentator as “a miracle”, and another as “in every respect excellent & vastly pleasing”, Arminio strangely received only six performances between 12 January and 12 February 1737 at London’s Covent Garden, and was never staged again for almost two hundred years. The heroic story, based on historical events occurring on the Germanic fringes of the Roman Empire, saw ist fulminant revival with a new and ravishing production only in 2016 in Karlsruhe. Max Emanuel Cencic is surrounded by a fine ensemble of singers, with the Greek ensemble Armonia Atenean in the pit, conducted by George Petrou. The press praised the multiply-award-winning production as “rehabilitation of the piece” (FAZ). “Cencic is not only as countertenor but also as stage director at the peak of his success” (Süddeutsche Zeitung).
Beethoven – The Complete String Quartets
“What seems to be the predominant impulse driving this music,” explains viola player Krzysztof Chorzelski of the Belcea Quartet, “is man’s yearning for freedom, the unquenchable desire to expand his limits and to learn the truth about himself in this process. Beethoven inspires us as performers to take up this challenge.” The Belcea Quartet’s response to this challenge took place in the Vienna Konzerthaus in May 2012. The ensemble embarked on the complete cycle of Beethoven string quartets, playing the whole program within twelve days, each concert featuring one work each from the early, middle and late quartets. Described as “a world-class ensemble” in The Guardian, this quartet brings a freshness to their interpretation of Beethoven’s string quartets, and draws forth a great range of colours, from sweetness to strength, from solemnity to impetuous force, while the cameras capture with great clarity the changing emotions of the players. Also available: DOCUMENTARY “On the Paths of the Beethoven String Quartets”. Directed by Jean Claude Mocik. Length approx. 52′.
Järvi conducts the Brahms Symphonies
With multiple critically-acclaimed symphonic cycles already under their collective belt, The Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen and its artistic director Paavo Järvi follow up their 2009 Beethoven cycle and 2011 Schumann cycle with a Brahms cycle! In concerts at Paris’s Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, they present all of Brahms’s symphonic masterpieces. “A Brahms revelation” The New York Times
El Prometeo
After its premier in 1669, Antonio Draghi’s opera El Prometeo has never been performed again – until Leonardo García Alarcón used the only remaining handwritten copy of the score to revive it in Dijon. Alarcón, who is the Opéra de Dijon’s artist in residence together with his orchestra Cappella Mediterranea, has made it his speciality to bring forgotten masterpieces to light, He thus descovered a missing link in the history of opera between the Venetian opera tradition and the one to rule Vienna in the following centuries.