Sir John Falstaff is an anarchist who obeys only the reign of his own enjoyment, an egoist who feeds only his power-hunger and his own flesh, and who would prefer to raze the small-minded morals of his contemporaries like the walls of a fortress – by…

Sergei Rachmaninoff's The Miserly Knight & Aleko from the Dmitri Hvorostovsky Festival 2019

Copernicus, the man behind the title of the opera, brought the revolution that radically changed man’s way of seeing things, shifting from the earth to the sun and its sacred flames. Barely a few stories – for there is no dramatic conflict here, no…

The late French composer Pierre Henry was among the pivotal forces behind the development of musique concrète, becoming the first formally educated musician to devote his energies to the electronic medium. His final work Dracula was originally…

Monteverdi’s iconic opera articulates Orpheus’ attempts to soothe the keepers of Hades with his voice and his lyre. He is allowed to release his beloved Eurydice from the realm of the dead, on the one condition that he does not turn around to look at…

A founding text of German operatic Romanticism and an absolute masterpiece of musical theatre, Der Freischütz by Carl Maria von Weber has not been performed at La Scala since 1998, when it was conducted by Donald Runnicles, but it is worthwhile…

For the Easter Festival 2017 in Baden-Baden, Sir Simon Rattle and the Berliner Philharmoniker draw their inspiration from Tosca, the most well-known and also most brilliant of all the Puccini operas. And that is deservedly so, since Tosca is not…

The „Il Trionfo del Tempo e del Disinganno" plot couldn’t be simpler: Time and Disillusion try to convince Beauty to abandon Pleasure for less fleeting gratifications. Krzysztof Warlikowski has taken Handel’s first oratorio, written when he was just…

Arrigo Boito's only finished and preserved opera, Mefistofele, recorded in Baden-Baden was praised by critics and loved by the audience - a very rare concurrence. And this could hardly have come as a surprise, since it was no other than Erwin Schrott…

Das Liebesverbot is one of Wagner‘s earliest operas - and yet, a central motive of many other works such as Tristan and Isolde is already clearly visible: The overpowering force of love and lust, that no law - manmade or otherwise - can tame. In this…