Michael Beyer
Wagner: Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg
Director Barrie Kosky’s explosive take on Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg caused a sensation at the 2017 Bayreuth Festival. The “astonishingly entertaining and convincing” production (Der Spiegel) boldly confronts Die Meistersinger’s nationalistic and anti-Semitic attitudes head-on: Wagner himself is placed centre stage, amid references to many figures from the composer’s life: his wife Cosima becomes the heroine Eva, and Hermann Levi, the conductor Wagner humiliated, becomes the reviled Sixtus Beckmesser. In Act 3 the singing contest is set at the Nuremberg Trials, with Hans Sachs’s hymn to the purity of German art coming from the lips of Wagner himself, addressing an empty courtroom.Opera News called it “a production of enormous insight and great quality”. “Kosky’s Meistersinger is a reminder that Bayreuth can still score palpable dramatic hits”, wrote The Guardian. The performance, conducted by Philippe Jordan, was also praised, with the superb cast of expert Wagnerians including Michael Volle (Sachs), Johannes Martin Kränzle (Beckmesser), Klaus Florian Vogt (Walther), Anne Schwanewilms (Eva) and Günther Groissböck (Pogner). But the focus remains on the composer, as The New York Times wrote, in an opera that “is Wagner’s mouthpiece, both when it’s humane and when it’s malignant”.
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Tchaikovsky: Swan Lake
It is the one ballet that everyone knows, has heard of or seen, and it is one of the loveliest and most frequently performed works in the ballet literature. No other ballet is capable of conjuring up such intensive images, dreams and yearnings simply at the mention of its name as Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake. Rudolf Nureyev created a new version of it in 1964 for the Vienna State Opera; it helped the dancer and choreographer, then 26 years old, to achieve international fame and also projected the Vienna State Ballet onto the world stage, where it was to become one of the company’s greatest successes.To mark the 50th anniversary of this ballet, the Vienna State Opera is now reviving it with new sets and costumes designed by Julia Spinatelli, whose concept is inspired by the fairy tale phantasy world of King Ludwig II incorporating simple, painted backdrops and few accessories, to present a new Swan Lake.
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Verdi: Messa da Requiem
Recorded live from the Hollywood Bowl, this performance of Verdi’s Requiem includes an amazing ensemble featuring Ildebrando D’ARcangelo, Vittorio Grigolo, Michelle DeYoung, Julianna Di Giacomo, Gustavo Dudamel, and the LA Philahmonic Orchestra and Chorus. As a bonus, an interview with Dudamel on the Requiem and the Hollywood Bowl.
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Tchaikovsky: The Nutcracker
Nearly twenty years on from his first staging of Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker ballet in 1967, the great ballet star and choreographer Rudolf Nureyev (1938-93) staged this, his final choreography of, and radically re-imagined revision of, this greatest of all ballets – the Paris version – in 1985 as director of the Paris ballet, a position he had ascended to two years earlier. Mr. Nureyev’s version enjoys a particular standing in the history of this ballet in that it was the first to incorporate the psychology of E. T. A Hoffman’s fairy tale on which Tchaikovsky’s ballet is based. In this production, the characters of Drosselmeyer and his nephew the Prince are one and the same person, representing the ideal man dreamt up by the Clara, the heroine, ready to leave her childhood and become a teenager. This presentation features dancers Liudmila Konovalova and Vladimir Shishov, the Wiener Staatsballett company, one of the world’s finest and the Wiener Staatsoper, conducted by Paul Connelly. “Elegant, romantic, delightful…great soloists, endearing pupils, fantasy-inspiring costumes, a harmonious and sure-footed ensemble” - Die Presse
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