Harry Fehr’s New Production of The Elixir of Love at the London Coliseum

Milan’s Teatro alla Scala was one of the first theatres to take on the arduous task of staging Les Troyens, at a time when Berlioz’s work was a matter of complete indifference to the public.In an epoch-making Italian edition, Giulietta Simionato amd Mario Del Monaco were able to restore their full dimension to the principal roles, thanks in part to the presence of Rafael Kubelik at the rostrum.Leaving it up to the English to go back to the original version some...

Absent from Paris operas for nearly twenty years – aside from an annual recital featuring exorbitant ticket prices – the theatrical Bartoli was awaited as impatiently as if she had been Christmas Eve. The prospect was especially exciting because it was an opera by Rossini, one of her favourite composers, whom the singer had chosen to celebrate her reunion with the French public. In fact, two years after a very acclamed passage at the Zurich Opera, the Théâtre des...

All too realistic, detailed, once again an enourmous sensitive direction of the Catalan enfant terrible Calixto Beito. He is ideally accompagnied and followed - for this Lady Macbeth of Mtensk - by the cast and his team, with stage designer Rebecca Ringst, costume designer Ingo Kruegler and light by Michael Bauer. The audience experiences the thriller of the inhuman circumstances of the land ruling family Izmailjow and their fatal extinction as well as the desperate life of...

After days of intensive negotiations, strike initiativesn and protest demonstrations, there was finally green light for this new production of Puccini's Manon Lescaut. Budget reductions, restructuring plans with layoffs and general political tensions led to a confrontation between syndicates, employees and workers, on one side, and management and politicians, on the other side, culminating in the acclaimation to close the opera house totally by the Lord mayor of Rome if this Premiere...

Would we witness the 19th century fairy tale scenery on stage, again? Would we be bored by a "normal" love-jealousy-revenge story as basis for brilliant singing and superbly instrumented orchestra playing, wondering why opera still made into the 21st century ? One can easily imagine by reading the plot before the performance. Not so when the curtain of this production rises ! Not so with Dmitri Tcherniakov ! Tcherniakov embeds the traditional plot into the reality of...

Höllers’ opus, originally commissioned by the Hamburg opera in 1984, has finally made to town, 24 years after its world premiere in Paris in 1989. An unexpected change of directors at the Hamburg theater shortly after the assignment, opened the chance for its first production in Paris, directed by Hans Neuenfels and under the baton of Lothar Zagrosek who also conducted the second production in 1991 at the Cologne opera house, directed by Friedrich Meyer-Oertel. The only...