First Rate Revival of Andrei Serban’s Turandot at the Royal Ballet and Opera, Covent Garden

 With merciless sequence is the audience drawn into Wozzeck’s circles of suffering in Büchner’s play. Berg’s music creates passion and compassion of and for the characters and victims of this inescapable orbit. The precision of Andrea Breth’s unstoppable clockwork in light of Wozzeck’s fate is a supreme staging and interpretation completely based on strict reserve and subordination to plot, text, and subtext. The purism of the approach...

Eighteen years ago, the first complete direction of Richard Wagner's Ring des Nibelungen in the Netherlands took place. It was then a highly regarded and rewarded project by the Libanese director Pierre Audi - and his stage designer George Tsypin - for the Netherlands Opera House (Nederlanse Opera) in Amsterdam. The direction relies on the concept of bringing the story close to the audience. It is the last time that the cycle is performed, and more than 165 000 people have seen...

Mozart's famous Singspiel, a new gender at his time of composing, returns to the charming and historic Cuvillés' Theater, a perfect setting on his own with its originals baroque stalls of the 18th century. Munich's second opera house, the Gärtnerplatztheater is currently under renovation, so the ensemble uses different locations in the city. This new production of Mozart's Entführung aus dem Serail is fresh colourful and fast moving. It is the first opera...

After Los Angeles and Valencia, this production has arrived at the Theater an der Wien, Vienna's third opera house having a long impressive history and tradition. Its origin is closely linked to the impressario Emanuel Schikaneder, Mozart's libretist for The Magic flute. In recent years, it has been focussing on presenting cutting edge directors and interesting productions. Verdi's I due Foscari followed on the success of his Ernani, was first presented in 1844, and is...

When Sergej Prokofjew’s opera „Fiery Angel“ was first performed in 1955 Russian or better Soviet music was still governed by the strict rules of socialist realism. Subsequently Prokofjew’s piece exposes  both strong anticlerical and antibourgeois sentiments : A woman, Renate, has fallen in love with an angel when she was  a girl and since then she is trying to find this angel again. In her quest she is accompanied by Rupprecht, a young man who is as...

Antonin Dvoraks major opera Rusalka has a weak performance history at the Wiener Staatsoper. Finally last Sunday we had the Premiere and first performance of the opera in the original complete version, 113 years after the world premiere in 1901. For director Sven Eric Bechtolf  the story of the mermaid Rusalka, the water goblin's daughter, is not a lyric fairytale. It is much more the thriller of a young virgin experiencing her sexual gender and first love affair loosing her...