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

Bregenz Festival 2022: Madama Butterfly

Puccini’s Madama Butterfly, one of the most played operas today, was staged on the Seebühne for the first time. Enrique Mazzola, who was also responsible for the Rigoletto production, leads “the Wiener Symphoniker to a beguiling string sound and a flexibility that is so important for Puccini” (Der Tagesspiegel). Director Andreas Homoki, who is the artistic director of the Opernhaus Zürich, and his internationally renowned team use Michael Levine’s magical stage set with its subtle landscape paintings to bring Japanese flair to Lake Constance. Barno Ismatullaeva’s performance as Cio-Cio-San “is simply world class!” (Online Merker). “Rightly a standing ovation ended the multiple dramatic evening.” (Neue Musikzeitung)

BBC Proms 2022: Leif Ove Andsnes & Mahler Chamber Orchestra

Leif Ove Andsnes directs the Mahler Chamber Orchestra from the keyboard in an all-Mozart programme including two contrasting piano concertos. “Leif Ove Andsnes and the Mahler Chamber Orchestra collaborated as creative equals, with pristine focus and quicksilver touch.” (The Guardian). PROGRAM Mozart: Overture to “Le nozze di Figaro”, Piano Concerto No. 20, K. 466, Piano Concerto No. 22, K. 482, Piano Concerto No. 23, K. 488 – II. Adagio

BBC Proms 2022: Yuja Wang & Klaus Mäkelä

Superstar pianist Yuja Wang takes centrestage in the first Proms appearance of the Oslo Philharmonic under its new Chief Conductor Klaus Makëlä. Richard Strauss’s Ein Heldenleben ends the concert in roof-raising style. “Boundless imagination matched to phenomenal technique made something far more fascinating than usual of Liszt’s First Piano Concerto.” (The Arts Desk) / “It was all something of a revelation […] Stunning, all of it.” (The Guardian) PROGRAM: Sibelius: Tapiola; Liszt: Piano Concerto No. 1; Vladimir Horowitz: Variations on a Theme from Bizet’s Carmen; Gluck: Dance of the Blessed Spirits from Orfeo ed Euridice; R. Strauss: Ein Heldenleben; J. Strauss II: Csárdás from Ritter Pásmán.

BBC Proms 2022: Marin Alsop conducts RSO Vienna

Marin Alsop and the Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra are joined by Proms regular and former BBC Radio 3 New Generation Artist Benjamin Grosvenor for Prokofiev’s ferociously demanding Piano Concerto No. 3. ‘My new symphony,’ wrote Dvorák of his Seventh, ‘must … make a stir in the world.’ The result does just that, emerging from a brooding opening into rhapsodic warmth, animated by folk dances and a seemingly endless stream of melodies. This contrasts with the deliciously grotesque episodes of Bartók’s The Miraculous Mandarin suite; and the orchestra and conductor also bring a new work by Viennese composer Hannah Eisendle, having given its world premiere in March 2022. PROGRAM: Bartók: The Miraculous Mandarin – suite 19’; Prokofiev: Piano Concerto No. 3 in C major; Hannah Eisendle: Heliosis 8’; Dvorák: Symphony No. 7 in D minor

BBC Proms 2022: CHINEKE! Orchestra plays Beethoven No. 9

‘Be embraced, all you millions!’ Since the earliest days of the Proms, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony has had a special place in each season – and with its climactic choral ‘Ode to Joy’, it’s one of those works that takes on a new meaning every time it’s played. This year, it’s performed by Chineke! – Europe’s first majority Black and ethnically diverse orchestra, along with Chineke! Voices. BBC Cardiff Singer of the World Nicole Cabell leads a world-class team of solo singers, and opens the Prom with the haunting Lilacs, the heartfelt song-cycle with which George Walker became the first African American composer to win the Pulitzer Prize for Music. “A high-voltage performance of Beethoven’s Symphony No 9 that took off from the start and did not hit the tarmac again until the last bars. […] Beethoven’s Ninth should always be as exhilarating as this.” (Financial Times) / Program Walker: Lilacs; Beethoven: Symphony No. 9

La Voix Humaine

“This innovative hour-long reimagining… is at once an operatic vignette and an acting showcase — well worth your time.” (The Times) La Voix Humaine, as visualised by Emmy and Bafta winning director James Kent offers an unprecedented cinematic interpretation of Poulenc’s masterpiece. As an hour long dramatic one-off, it features only one performer, the character known only as Elle. It was premiered in Paris in 193 as a play by Jean Cocteau and subsequently turned into music drama by his friend Francis Poulenc in 1959. Written originally in 1928, Cocteau was examining change that the technology of the telephone was to bring to humans and how they conducted their relationships. “In spite of it all, we are connected by this telephone… this line is the last thing tying me to us”. The viewer is skilfully placed as a silent observer of Elle’s desperate conversation, captured in the intimate and claustrophobic setting of a single apartment. Her hopes, her longings, her nostalgia, and her final acceptance, all illuminated by a powerful score conducted by Antonio Pappano. We feel her pain as she grapples with love and loss over the course of one late afternoon via a single, suspenseful, often interrupted, telephone call with her departing lover.

Christophe Rousset conducts Rameau

“Under the baton of Christophe Rousset, everything is perfectly executed, weighed, clean, the gestures are soft, everything is bathed in a precise but gentle delicacy” (forumopera.com) A true spearhead of French music, Jean-Philippe Rameau has always accompanied the Talens Lyriques and has quickly become an emblematic figure in their history. This is why they wanted to celebrate their 30th anniversary at the Châtelet with a programme dedicated to him. And what better work to do so than Les Fêtes d’Hébé ou Les Talens Lyriques? With Ambroisine Bré, Cyrille Dubois and Florian Sempey, they perform large excerpts from this opera-ballet composed in 1739 as well as from the lyrical tragedy Dardanus. PROGRAM Rameau: Les Fêtes d’Hébé ou Les Talens Lyriques? (extracts), Dardanus (extracts)

Gardiner conducts Berlioz and Elgar

The Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France joins forces with conductor Sir John Eliot Gardiner and violist Antoine Tamestit for a concert featuring Italy and putting two composers in the spotlight: Hector Berlioz and Edward Elgar. With Harolde en Italie, Hector Berlioz invokes transalpine landscapes. Shaped by the period when the composer was resident at the Villa Medici, this symphony in four parts gives pride of place to the viola, played here by Antoine Tamestit – “one of the two or three greatest current performers” (Diapason). In the South (Alassio), composed between 1903 and 1904 by Edward Elgar, is still about Italy, pastoral atmosphere and Byronic colours. Brilliantly complex, this work, written in record time, is one of the peaks of romantic music. Let us travel a little deeper into Edward Elgar’s melancholy with his Sospiri. This adagio for strings composed at the dawn of the First World War is captivating in its romanticism and passion.

Coppel-i.a.

While love is breaking into the lives of two young people, an artificial being will challenge what they believed they knew about it… Revisiting this classic of the Romantic repertoire, Jean-Christophe Maillot gives us, with an original musical score, a reflection on the search for the ideal partner in a technologically advanced society. Is it still the flesh and blood being with which we are familiar or a different being, making us question our allegiance to the human race? “Les Ballets de Monte-Carlo magnificent as always” (La Stampa)