Moreover, the grandeur and ambition of work, production, and orchestral performance notwithstanding, not to forget the work of the excellent chorus, there was something winningly intimate, in the opéra comique tradition to what we saw and heard from the singers on stage. That is not to suggest a lack of vocal scale, but simply to point to their convincing performances as characters o...
Ricarda Merbeth verkörperte eine Elektra, die in ihren eigenen Gedanken gefangen ist. Schon mit den Rufen nach „Agamemnon“ ergriff sie die Herzen des Publikums. Ihre starke Stimme mit großem Vibrato, kann nicht nur markerschütternd sein, sondern auch überraschend fein und warm, als sie die Rückkehr ihres Bruders Orest besang. Sie wurde immer mehr zur Elektra und selbst in den hohen L...
"Miraculous music of transformation spills out of the orchestra pit. Ingo Metzmacher manages a remarkable evening there with the Staatskapelle Berlin: The permanent fine-tuning that Strauss demands of his orchestra between the conversational tone and the power center works almost without a hitch. Metzmacher even manages to bring out the modernity of the score without suffering any ma...
A more magnificent, more tasteful, more opulent "Rosenkavalier" has hardly ever been seen. André Heller, multimedia artist and full-time dream inventor, has set out to create an ideal setting for his debut as an opera director, with "sensuousness, beauty and accuracy", as he puts it, in which the full mastery of Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Richard Strauss can unfold could. The Berlin S...
And Sebastian Weigle, once the horn player of the Staatskapelle, now leads the opera as a conductor with a deep understanding of the forest romance and the sensitivity of the fairy tale tone: he places the orchestra's most cautious pianissimo under the enchantingly clear voices of Katrin Wundsam as Hansel and Elsa Dreisig as Gretel. "
That is certainly the greatest architectural and acoustic treasure of this house: proximity. In Achim Freyer's production of “Hansel and Gretel” you sit inside a child's heart. It is a dark room of dreams and lust, of fear and wishes, of a fantasy that gives birth to the monstrous: a garden spider as God in heaven, a giant cat with white mice sticking to its tongue, and a witch with...