Acting
Day 3 of the Ring Cycle. DVD release June 2009.
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The Pucchini opera "Turandot" will be shown completely new at the Gran Teatre del Liceu. The new production by the Spanish video artist Franc Aleu refers with a wink to the history of the Catalan institution: 20 years ago, this very opera was resumed there after a fire in 1994 severely damaged the theater.
The Nikolaus Lehnhoff production of Richard Strauss's "Elektra", recorded live at the Salzburger Festspiele in 2010. Iréne Theorin stars as Elektra, with Eva-Maria Westbroek as Chrysothemis, Waltraud Meier as Klytämnestra, Robert Gambill as Aegisth, and René Pape as Orest. Daniele Gatti conducts the Wiener Philharmoniker.
After twenty years of absence, Puccini’s Turandot was revived on the stage of the Teatro Real in a new production by American stage director Robert Wilson. One of the most important theatre and visual artist of our times, the director who gave life to Philip Glass’s Einstein of the Beach and who reinvented Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande hadn’t worked on a Puccini opera in twenty-five years, since his ground-breaking Madama Butterfly commissioned by the Paris Opera in 1993. This new encounter between his powerful visual universe and Puccini’s evocative music was bound to be an outstanding event. Carried out by a brilliant cast of singers, dominated by Irene Theorin as Turandot, Gregory Kunde as Calaf and Yolanda Auyanet as Liù, this magnificent production is conducted by the Teatro Real’s associate musical director Nicola Luisotti – and has been met with universal acclaim.
Day 2 of the Ring Cycle. DVD release June 2009.
Since the 1990s, Christoph Marthaler and his congenial stage and costume designer Anna Viebrock have caused a sensation with highly musical and atmospheric productions of plays and operas. It was only a matter of time, then, before this directing team was also invited to the Bayreuth Festival. Marthaler's style of radical deceleration proved ideally suited to Wagner's Tristan und Isolde in this production – with Viebrock's sober yet poetic sets – unveiled in 2005. In the 2009 revival documented here, Robert Dean Smith and Iréne Theorin were joined in the title roles by Robert Holl, one of the great basses of his generation, who sang the role of King Marke.
A father’s blinding ambition and a daughter’s profound defiance drive the story forward in the cycle’s dramatic second installment. This Ring production is partly #MeToo, partly environmental—and almost entirely American.
A fearless young hero battles otherworldly challenges on a journey to discover his destiny.
Götterdämmerung, the final instalment of Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung, is a story of human passions. Two essentially benevolent creatures, involved with and possibly doomed by their traffic with the gods, find treachery and evil in the world of the humans, and are ruined by the dark side of humanity. Iréne Theorin, acclaimed worldwide for her portrayal of Wagner’s heroines, stars as Brünnhilde opposite Lance Ryan, who continues his radiant portrayal of the tragic hero Siegfried. The strong cast also includes Mikhail Petrenko as the dark antagonist Hagen and Johannes Martin Kränzle, who once again shines as his father Alberich. Waltraud Meier has a memorable appearance as Brünnhilde’s sister Waltraute. With this 2013 recording of Götterdämmerung, the musically and visually compelling Scala Ring Cycle by Daniel Barenboim and Guy Cassiers was completed and proved to be one of the highlights of the Richard Wagner bicentenary.
As the end nears for the gods, and human ambition rules the world, Alberich’s son Hagen hatches a plot to take control of the ring, threatening the union of Siegfried and Brünnhilde. Fueled by greed, Hagen’s actions lead to chaos and destruction, until Brünnhilde steps forward to return the world to its natural order.
Die Walküre (The Valkyrie), WWV 86B, is an opera in three acts by Richard Wagner with a German libretto by the composer. It is the second of the four operas that form Wagner's cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen (The Ring of the Nibelung). The story of the opera is based on the Norse mythology told in the Volsunga Saga and the Poetic Edda.[1][2] In Norse mythology, a valkyrie is one in a group of female figures who decide which soldiers die in battle and which live. Die Walküre's best-known excerpt is the "Ride of the Valkyries". DVD release June 2009.
