Orgia: Parra and Bieito Recreate Pasolini

Munich and Jonas Kaufmann have been closely linked over the last years. He has been born here and the Munich State Opera is engaging him intensively. Many role debuts of the star tenor have taken place here. That is the case for the current production of Giuseppe Verdi's Aida too. After a first appearence in Rome in concert after a recording of the opera, it is now his first Radames on stage in a production from 2009, directed by Christoph Nel and designed by Jens Killian. They have...

Opening Night at the Met is like no other night. It is that night when the show is as much on stage as it is in the audience, when the most classical tuxedos leave space to the craziest, fanciest and brightest gowns. Opera aficionados are happy to see each other and are catching up like school kids after a summer vacation while more “notable” New Yorkers slowly and strategically walk the red carpet so it does not look like they are holding up before they get in front of the...

Palermo has a spectacular location along the tyrrhenian coast line, and right in the middle of the city, resides Italy's biggest opera house with the appropriate name Teatro Massimo. It is a classical building, a copy of a Greek temple, and one can well imagine what a feeling it was to enter in such a temple by climbing the stairs to the entrance of this massive building. It was openend in 1897 and witnessed the glory and wealth of the city after a construction period of 20 years....

The Ruhrtriennale has its reputation for extraordinary performances at special locations, as a revival of the devastated industrial infrastructure of the area. The festival offers a mix of opera, drama, dance and concerts. Further installations, DJ sessions and Johan's saloon, set together by Johan Simons, the artistic director of the festival, sum up the schedule lasting 6 weeks. This year the performance of Richard Wagner's Das Rheingold, the overture of the tetralogy of...

Based on the myth of Orpheus, Christoph Willibald Gluck’s Orphée et Eurydice is a seminal work in the evolution of opera. With its focus on an underground rescue mission in which the hero must conceal his true feelings, it was to be a major influence on German opera and specifically the plots of Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte, Beethoven’s Fidelio and Wagner’s Das Rheingold. It was also highly innovative musically with its preceding of the three verses of the...

Tragedia dell' ascolto was the classification of his opera by Luigi Nono. He was born 1924 in Venice and he had a strong relation to his home town. His composition style was formed by the sound and the special hearing environment of the laguna city with its echoing waters, greenless brick architecture of stairs, arcades and narrow streets. Even if he was a music revolutionary and the creator of contemporary Italian music, he was still very close to the traditional composing education...