In Il tabarro (‘The Cloak’), surrounded by the decaying miasma of the river Seine, we have arrived in purgatory on earth. Puccini sets the piece in the present day, in Paris, in a realistic, Simenon-like milieu of stevedores, drinkers, and whores. In an oppressive atmosphere of hopelessness a love triangle arises between Giorgetta, her husband – the barge owner Michele – and his stevedore Luigi. Giorgetta is a woman with a history: she’s a mother who has lost a child and whose marriage is on the verge of breakdown. She starts an affair with Luigi, which gives her a momentary escape from the bleakness of her everyday life… Il tabarro fathoms the entire unremitting darkness of human existence. “Grigorian’s final scene, which milks the unexpected poignancy of her simply changing in front of us from her habit into a sleek black cocktail dress and letting down her hair, is just as wrenching.” The New York Times
Salzburg Festival 2022: Suor Angelica
In Suor Angelica the perspective has narrowed to the tragic fate of a single figure, the young nun Angelica. Banished to the convent for an indiscretion, she leads a joyless existence and waits for news of her son, whom she has been forbidden to see since his birth. When she learns that he has died, she resolves to put an end to her life. The climax of the opera is an extended monologue lasting 20 minutes in which Angelica works through her doubts as a devout Catholic and frees herself from her feelings of guilt and remorse. In a redemptive ending she finally transcends all her pain and escapes her agony. With a radiant finale Puccini opens up a path for her into the spheres of celestial paradise. “Overwhelming” Opernwelt
Salzburg Festival 2022: Káta Kabanová
Janácek’s opera Káta Kabanová is set in a small Russian town and is based on the play The Storm by Aleksandr Ostrov– sky. The story revolves around the central character, Káta – sung by “the phenomenal Corinne Winters” (Neue Musikzeitung) – who is trapped in a loveless marriage to an abusive man named Boris. Despite her unhappiness, she is bound by the strict societal norms of her time and is unable to escape the situation. However, when she meets and falls in love with a young man named Vána Kudrjáš, she finally experiences happiness and passion. But their relationship is short-lived, as Boris finds out and forces Káta to confess her infidelity in front of the entire town. Overwhelmed by the shame and guilt, she drowns herself in the nearby river. The opera explores themes of social conformity, oppression, and the consequences of forbidden love. Janácek’s use of musical leitmotifs and repetitive themes reflect the characters’ emotions and psychological states, adding depth and nuance to the story. Stage director Barrie Kosky managed to create an intimate but impressive setting in the magnificent Felsenreitschule. “The young Czech conductor Jakub Hruša, highly esteemed by the Wiener Philharmoniker, leads the orchestra with a feeling for the great moments as well as the fine lyricism of the grandiose score. Corinne Winters is thrilling in the title role” (Kronenzeitung)
Salzburg Festival 2022: Bluebeard’s Castle
A pinnacle of early 20th-century musical theatre, Bluebeard’s Castle was composed to a text by Béla Balázs in 1911. The story of Bluebeard has its literary archetype in Charles Perrault’s fairy tales and tells of a wife-murderer who forbids his latest wife, who is driven by curiosity, to open a door behind which he has hidden his previous victims. Bartók’s opera develops entirely out of the dialogue between the two protagonists, Bluebeard and Judith, revealing an approach to the drama as a kind of spiritual and emotional force field. ‘Where is the stage: outside or within?’, as the prologue puts it, an invitation to the audience to ask themselves questions about the enigmatic nature of theatre as an allusive reverberation of the real. “Truly fascinating […] Outstanding: Mika Kares and Ausrine Stundyte.” (La Stampa)
Salzburg Festival 2022: De Temporum Fine Comedia
De temporum fine comoedia (A Play on the End of Time) is the Last Judgement, in a reinterpretation rooted in Carl Orff’s personal religious beliefs. The writing of the text in Ancient Greek, Latin and German took the composer a whole decade, from 1960 to 1970, with the essence of the work being increasingly determined by the apocalyptic vision of the Alexandrian theologian Origen, in which at the end of time even demons will be granted forgiveness and salvation. Brought to the Festival stage by Romeo Castellucci and Teodor Currentzis for the first time since ist premiere in Salzburg in 1973, Orff’s opera-oratorio overwhelms the listener with its primeval energy. The latter results not least from persistently iterated rhythmic patterns that involve a host of figures animated by a mechanical principle of motion that is translated into bodily movement scores by the choreographer Cindy Van Acker. “Castellucci and Currentzis celebrate music theatre of monumental sparseness in its images and an exuberant opulence in its means.” (TAZ)
Iolanta and the Nutcracker
When Tchaikovsky premiered his famous ballet The Nutcracker in Saint Petersburg 130 years ago, it was presented as a double bill, as standard at the time, together with the opera Iolanta. The Volksoper Wien, being part home to the famous Wiener Staatsballett, under the helm of the new music director Omer Meir Wellber decided to present both works again in one evening, but not as two separate pieces, but by fusing the two works into one. Iolanta is a blind princess. A famous doctor can cure her, but only after she is being told about her blindness. Her father doesn’t want to break that horrible news to her. Lotte de Beer: “In her blindness Iolanta lives with a magical imagination of everything that surrounds her. The Nutcracker music and the dancers of the Wiener Staatsballett show us Iolanta’s world perception by her inner eye. But there comes a time in life, when you have to decide whether to remain a blind princess or to see the world in all its imperfection.” This production plays on the cutting edge of fantasy and reality, of being a child and being a grown-up, of opera and dance. In short: it’s a family-show to the core.
La gazza ladra
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)
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.
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)