Accompanied by a luxurious team of professionals,led by renowned stage director Peter Stein and conductor Ádám Fischer, a number of international young singers were given the opportunity to introduce themselves to the public of La Scala in an extremely high level setting. The result was an instant success, not only with the audience of La Scala, which is famous for its more than critical loggionisti, but also with the television audience, where the live broadcast reached record breaking viewing rates. According to Die Presse Fischer “gets the best out of the Accademia Orchestra with delicate execution and humane phrasing” while the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung praises “the high number of promising young voices”, including the “radiantly brilliant Newcomer Fatma Said as Pamina and Yasmin Özkan as a flawlessly great Queen of the Night”.
La Bohème
120 years after its very first performance, which took place at Teatro Regio di Torino, La Bohème returns to the tradition-steeped Italian opera house. With director Àlex Ollé from La Fura dels Baus and music director Gianandrea Noseda the Teatro Regio presents a spectacular, up-to-date anniversary production featuring a young, lively and high-quality cast. “A triumphant youthful Bohème”, in which the singers excel due to their naturalness. Giorgio Berrugi sings his Rodolfo “with a luminous timbre, in refined nuances” (La Stampa), perfectly matching “Irina Lungu’s full-bodied Mimì” (The London Times). All in all, “this is theatre, this is life, this is passion” (Corriere della sera).
Giovanna d’Arco
With more than 50 years of experience as film director, Peter Greenaway (Nightwatching, Eisenstein in Guanajuato) combines the worlds of film and opera with Giovanna d’Arco at the Verdi Festival in Parma. The opera’s libretto is based on Friedrich Schiller’s The Maid of Orleans. It tells the story of the French national hero Jeanne d’Arc. Earthly passion and supernatural purity are rendered vivid in the musical interpretation of the Virtuosi Italiani and the Coro del Teatro Regio di Parma, conducted by Ramón Tebar, and by three exceptional singers, Vittoria Yeo, Luciano Ganci and Vittorio Vitelli, “who have the Verdian idiom in their blood, performing veritable miracles of expressive singing and italianità” (Kieler Nachrichten). Turning the auditorium into the scene, Greenaway includes the unique architecture of the Teatro Farnese, one of Italy’s oldest and most exceptional theatre gems, into his staging. By the help of spectacular video and light installations, he creates a completely new opera experience, using a picture language that reaches from depictions of the Madonna to modern manga girls and the real faces of refugee children.
Helene Fischer: Christmas – Live from the Hofburg Vienna
Helene Fischer, the most successful German singer of our time, and the renowned Royal Philharmonic Orchestra in a Christmas show at Vienna’s Hofburg, dedicated to some of the most popular English Christmas carols and classics of all time – featuring Plácido Domingo, Ricky Martin and the Wiener Sängerknaben.
LGT Young Soloists String Ensemble
The LGT Young Soloists delight audiences worldwide with their rousing performances at highest artistic level. They are invited to perform regularly at renowned concert halls around the world in cities like New York, Beijing, Shanghai, Moscow, Munich, Vienna, Zurich, Hong Kong and Singapore. The string ensemble is made up of highly gifted young musicians aged between 13 and 22 years. Each member already has a successful soloist career: between them, the LGT Young Soloists have already won more than 80 prizes in national and international competitions. PROGRAM: Rimsky-Korsakov/E. Zimbalist: Le Coq d‘Or Fantasy (Golden Cockerel) for violin and string orchestra, arr. Paul Struck; Rachmaninov: Vocalise op 34, No. 14 for viola and string orchestra
Opera Gala Bonn
5th Opera Gala in Bonn, Germany for the German AIDS Foundation. PROGRAM: Arias and scenes from operas by Mozart, Verdi, Donizetti, Rossini, Gounod, Beethoven, Delibes, Offenbach, Curtis, de Arditi, Johann Strauss.
The Piano Guys live at Red Rocks
Watch them get music out of classical instruments in ways their original inventors never envisioned! What began as an experiment and then exploded into an Internet phenomenon has now evolved into an incredible success story. The Piano Guys, four talented dads from Utah, have climbed the Great Wall of China for their craft, landed atop Billboard charts, sold out tour dates around the world, accrued a massive social media following and scored YouTube viewership at over 500 million views. The Piano Guys brings their artistry to the stunning Red Rocks Amphitheatre in Morrison, Colorado for this all-new music special.
Bayreuth Festival 2016: Parsifal
No burkas and no bikinis – long before Bayreuth’s latest Parsifal had opened in Uwe Eric Laufenberg’s new reading, these two phrases had done the rounds, their emotive content ensuring that the production was hotly debated. Laufenberg shows us everything: the Grail chalice, the dead swan, the wound, the lance. Such realism in the staging, which above all reveals an eye for intricate detail, creates the impression of a new radicalism. With Klaus Florian Vogt “as a powerfully heroic Parsifal (…), the beautiful gold, silver piercing iron of Elena Pankratova’s voice as Kundry (…), Georg Zeppenfeld as a slim Gurnemanz providing unparalleled vocal command (…) and Ryan McKinny as a noble and agonised Amfortas.” (The Telegraph)
Olga Peretyatko – My Love for Rossini
Olga Peretyatko – My Love for Rossini is dedicated to the famous Russian soprano and her admiration for the composer Gioachino Rossini. This documentary includes footage of Olga Peretyatko singing several of Rossini’s most famous arias in concert with the Orchestra del Teatro Comunale di Bologna conducted by Alberto Zedda. She reflects on her life, her experiences as a singer, and above all, her love for Rossini.
Lang Lang – New York Rhapsody
Lang Lang‘s „New York Rhapsody“ is a love letter to the city he considers his adoptive home, set to the music that helped make this city so famous and performed at one of New York‘s most iconic venues, Lincoln Center. The one-night-only show embraces a wide range of musical styles and voices capturing New York‘s magic, from Leonard Bernstein, Aaron Copland, and Danny Elfman to Lou Reed, Alicia Keys, and Don Henley, including a rare performance of the original 1924 jazz band arrangement of George Gershwin‘s “Rhapsody in Blue”. Joining Lang Lang are celebrated artists such as Rufus Wainwright, Suzanne Vega, Kurt Elling, Regina Spector, Jerry Douglas, and rising stars including Grammy-nominated singer Andra Day, genre-bending violinist Lindsey Stirling, and Grammy-winning trumpeter Sean Jones, in addition to a 30-piece orchestra with musical direction by David Lai.