Requiring 38 soloists, chorus and large orchestra, Hans Pfitzner’s Palestrina is a challenging opera to stage. In Munich, the city in which it was given its world premiere in 1917, director Christian Stückl and the Bavarian State Opera met those…

”Classic Archive“ is a new series featuring music DVDs of legendary artists, thus offering – at a sensational mid-range price - a unique view of our classical music heritage. Sviatoslav Richter (1915-1997), who, without exaggeration, can easily be…

This exciting open-air staging of Nabucco was one of the classical highlights in summer 2007. The vast production of the Verdi masterpiece at St. Margarethen took place amidst the intoxicating scenery of a rustically romantic Roman quarry, which…

Surely Bach’s French Suites, which he composed during his years at Cöthen (1717–1723), are among the finest inducements to practise that any teacher has ever made to a pupil. In this case Bach wrote them for his young wife, Anna Magdalena. The over…

Il matrimonio segreto is Cimarosa's most famous opera buffa and it is one of the few comic operas to have maintained its place in the repertoire until today. At its first performance in 1792, Austrian emperor Leopold II is reputed to have liked this…

Mussorgskis monumental “national music drama” Khovanshchina in the brilliant instrumentation of Dmitri Shostakovich is regarded as one of the most important works of Russian Opera. The five-act opera about the Moscow Uprising of 1682 was unfinished…

When Korean composer Unsuk Chin’s opera was first performed by the Bavarian State Opera in Munich, it caused a sensation among music critics worldwide. Based on Lewis Carroll’s famous and fascinatingly enigmatic novel Alice in Wonderland, it is a…

“Once again Loy has created the happiest of marriages between a role and it's interpreter, and Edita Gruberova faces up to the manifold demands of this difficult part with uncompromising assurance, relying on her phenomenal technique, her radiant top…

Die Entführung aus dem Serail (The Abduction from the Seraglio) is one of Mozart’s five great repertoire operas alongside Le nozze di Figaro, Don Giovanni, Cosi fan tutte and Die Zauberflöte. A typical ‘Singspiel’, a form in which all the dialogue is…

With its recordings of Mozart’s string quartets Nos. 14 to 19, the Hagen Quartet exhibits some of the composer’s most refined compositional thinking and a remarkably wide range of emotions. These quartets were composed in the early 1780s and served…