With his Macbeth, Giuseppe Verdi broke with the operatic conventions of the time and created one of his darkest and most abysmal works. Directed by Krzysztof Warlikowski, the timeless drama unfolds in a new interpretation that takes the audience on an intense journey into human abysses. An opera of this kind demands not only outstanding voices but also outstanding actors. “Vladislav Sulimsky is forceful and brutish in the title role, at times truly frightening, always utterly assured.” (Financial Times) Asmik Grigorian is giving her debut as Lady Macbeth and performs “with an urgency of expression that needs no further explanation.” (Salzburger Nachrichten) “Her singing becomes a victory over expressive resistance.” (Frankfurter Allgemeine) “Philippe Jordan celebrated a triumph on the podium of the Wiener Philharmoniker” (Kurier), his “Macbeth crackles with power and electricity, propelled by its own velocity. The orchestra attacks the score with relish.” (Financial Times)
Salzburg Festival 2023: Le nozze di Figaro
Le nozze di Figaro is Lorenzo Da Ponte’s and Mozart‘s first of their three jointly created operas about attempts at interpersonal relationships: a turbulent comedy with erotic entanglements, which was not a harmless comedy even in Mozart’s day. Director Martin Kušej moves the drama of love and jealousy to a mafia-like urban milieu where conflicts are fought out with pistols. Young French conductor Raphaël Pichon, “original sound expert” (Der Tagesspiegel) and for the first time on the podium of the Wiener Philharmoniker, leads a young ensemble of singers around clan boss Almaviva (“vocally flawlessly brilliant: Andrè Schuen”, Hamburger Abendblatt). “Kušej’s staging is musical, Pichon’s conducting theatrical; the two work together to a degree that is far more rare than it should be. Every detail has been carefully thought through, and the symbiosis is breathtaking.” (Financial Times)
Bregenz Festival 2023: Ernani
Six years before Rigoletto, Giuseppe Verdi had already composed a gripping drama about love and revenge: Ernani – his breakthrough as a composer. The opera was also based on a play by the French author Victor Hugo, whose text inspired Verdi’s unique style with moving arias, stirring choruses and scenes of high drama: Elvira is desired by three men – among them the Spanish king and her old uncle. But she loves the robber Ernani, of all people, who has a score to settle with the king… “As much as this brilliant and precisely executed evening is always one over, it cleverly always moves just below the caricature threshold. Scurrilous drama, bizarre humour and splatter comedy serve only one thing: the unmasking of the guys.” (Münchner Merkur); “A mixture of Tarantino’s ‘Kill Bill’ and Monty Python’s ‘The Knights of the Coconut’.” (Deutschlandfunk)
Salzburg Festival 2023: Falstaff
Falstaff is Giuseppe Verdi’s third opera based on a Shakespeare play and the last opera he composed. Designed as a comedy of errors, it illustrates the abysses of human inadequacies. Christoph Marthaler, “that wondrous theatre magician” (Tiroler Tageszeitung), stages the comedy as a tongue-in-cheek Orson Welles homage, who himself
impersonated and filmed “Falstaff” in 1965, and moves the action from Windsor around 1400 to a chaotic film set of the 1960s: a confusion of identities and genres. “Avantgardiste conductor and Falstaff debutant Ingo Metzmacher gave his Falstaff orchestra the ride of its life. It was mighty and infectious.” (operatoday.com) The Canadian bass-baritone Gerald Finley in the title role is convincing with his “magnificent playing marked by precise laconism” (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung), Russian soprano Elena Stikhinas in the role of Alice “enchants with heavenly heights” (Südwest Presse). “Creative and innovative” Kurier
Salzburg Festival 2023: The Greek Passion
Bohuslav Martinu’s opera The Greek Passion, here in the 1961 version, is based on the novel The re-crucified Christ by Nikos Kazantzakis. The opera develops the Christian doctrine of “love thy neighbour” ad absurdum, as a group of refugees are driven out of a little Greek village just as the village is putting on a Passion play for Holy Week. The opera is a pessimistic plea for humanity, made in the awareness that humanity must always wrestle anew with its own egoism. Director Simon Stone “creates a modern parable, somehow both contemporary and timeless.” (The Times) For the last of his 16 operas, Martinu developed a tonal language which combined his early musical experiences with elements of Greek folklore, Greek Orthodox liturgy and dance music. Maxime Pascal at the podium of the Wiener Philharmoniker for the first time, “unfolds a musical and dramatic intensity that makes your hair stand on end, both in the tender outbursts and the violent ones. A maestro of his time.” (Le Figaro). “A highlight of this year’s Salzburg Festival”
The Times
Goldberg Variations
Simply Clavier-Übung bestehend in einer Aria mit verschiedenen Veraenderungen, Johann Sebastian Bach titled his Goldberg Variations in 1742 – and composed a fascinating compendium of variations, canons and fugues. In 1993, the Swiss choreographer Heinz Spoerli took up the challenge of meeting Bach’s opus summum of piano literature with dance – and created one of his signature works: a dance drama about man, his joys and fears, loneliness and lusts, bonds and ruptures, youth and old age, which builds up
from making music with the body. Now, 30 years after its creation, it’s been brought to the stage of the Wiener Staatsoper in a new set and costume design, especially for the Wiener Staatsballett – “a wonderful addition to the repertoire” (Tanz). “The courage to choreograph Johann Sebastian Bach’s Goldberg Variations for piano was rewarded. Spoerli has succeeded in creating a highly attractive and musical exploration of the variations, which shows pure dance in many colorful facets. […] The spectrum ranges from large group scenes to solos and pas de deux. All highlights.” (Kurier)
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)
Everything for Dawn
Written over three years by 15 librettists and composers, this 10-episode serial represents a radical new approach to opera. Bringing together different musical styles and voices, and shot in a sound stage, Everything for Dawn is a mesmerizing synthesis of streaming television and theatrical spectacle. It is an original coming-of-age story spanning the 1990s. Dawn is a teenager dealing with the impact of her father’s suicide and her personal tragedy becomes public when his paintings become celebrated as “outsider art”. With each episode, the opera is an examination of the ways we seek solace in a broken world, community intersectionality, and the rationale for making art. Soprano Britt Hewitt in the role of Dawn, baritone Aaron Engebreth as her father Mac and mezzo-soprano Sishel Claverie as her mother Gloria, as part of a cast of eight, are backed by a six-piece music ensemble. “‘Everything for Dawn’ stretches the boundaries of genre and storytelling to recalibrate opera for the twenty first century.”Opera News
BBC Proms 2023: Northern Soul
Curated by writer and broadcaster Stuart Maconie, the Northern Soul Prom is here to get you on your feet. This stomping celebration of British club culture brings a symphonic edge to the beats that took English towns across the industrial North and Midlands by storm in the 1960s and 1970s. What began as a celebration of forgotten American soul B-sides became a euphoric release at all-night dances for a young generation living for the weekends. “Extraordinary sound […] a full rhythm section and an unbelievable cast of vocalists” (The Prickle) “Pure euphoria, sweeping most of the pension-age crowd to their feet” (The Times)
BBC Proms 2023: Bollywood Legend – Lata Mangheshkar
Don’t miss this Prom’s tribute to the Nightingale of India: ‘Queen of Melody’ Lata Mangheshkar, whose voice was the soundtrack for generations of cinema-goers. The legendary Bollywood playback singer died in 2022, aged 92. For this concert, her legacy is celebrated by the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra. The orchestra plays under the direction of Michael Seal, Indian singer Palak Muchhal and her younger brother Palash are doing the vocal parts. Together, they mark the immense career and catalogue of an extraordinary, era-defining artist. “Celebrate the musical legacy of Hindi cinema!” (The Daily Telegraph)