De troubadour by Verdi, Van (2021/2021), Geregisseerd door Adele Thomas, Dirigent Gianandrea Noseda, Opernhaus, Zürich, Zwitserland

Il trovatore Casting this opera, as Enrico Caruso once put it, is very easy: You only need the four best singers in the world. Our soloist quartet has undoubtedly earned this title: the Latvian soprano Marina Rebeka makes her debut as Leonora, her lover Manrico is Piotr Beczała. His opponent Count Luna is Quinn Kelsey, whom the Zurich audience will remember as Rigoletto, and the Polish mezzo-soprano Agnieszka Rehlis will return to Zurich as Azucena. Gianandrea Noseda makes his debut as general music director; For the first time in Zurich, the young British director Adele Thomas, whose sensual and theatrical imagery predestines her for this work. Verdi's Trovatore has to endure a major contradiction - namely that of being one of the most criticized and at the same time one of the most popular operas in the entire repertoire. The dark plot, which could hardly be understood without knowledge of the previous history, gave cause for criticism. The reason for the popularity of the piece since the triumphant premiere is Verdi's unrestrained melodic inventiveness, the musical dramaturgy based on sharp contrasts and the brilliance of the vocal parts. Like the other two operas in the trilogia popolare that established Verdi's world fame - La traviata and Rigoletto - Il trovatore also representsa social outsider figure at the center of the action: Azucena, whose insatiable thirst for revenge runs through the rapidly developing plot like a red thread. She once saw her mother burned at the stake. Torn by the pain of this injustice, she kidnapped the son of the family who was responsible for the burning of the alleged witch to see him die in the fire as well. What only Azucena knows, however, is that the child she threw into the fire in blind despair was her son; Manrico, who grew up with her and considers himself her son, is in truth the brother of the hated Count Luna. Now Luna and Manrico, the "troubadour", are not only fighting against each other in the civil war on different sides, but they are also rivals,