Acting
The best in the performing arts from across America and around the world including a diverse programming portfolio of classical music, opera, popular song, musical theater, dance, drama, and performance documentaries.
A handsome prince falls in love with an abducted princess. Armed with musical instruments, he and his singing sidekick mount a rescue mission that tests their commitment to truth, love and humanity itself.
On Thursday 2 May 2019, the Monteverdi Choir and English Baroque Soloists, led by John Eliot Gardiner, brought a new production of Semele to “London’s oldest new theatre” at Alexandra Palace. This concert-staging of “Handel’s sexiest opera”, directed by Thomas Guthrie, was the only London date on a prestigious European tour. Featuring a young, glamorous cast of international soloists, the performance provided London audiences with a fuller version of the work, notably with some passages by Handel very rarely heard in modern performances.
Strauss’s elegant romance brings the glamour and enchantment of 19th-century Vienna to cinemas worldwide in a sumptuous production by legendary director Otto Schenk that “is as beautiful as one could hope” (The New York Times). Soprano Rachel Willis-Sørensen stars as the title heroine, a young noblewoman in search of love on her own terms. Radiant soprano Louise Alder is her sister, Zdenka, and bass-baritone Tomasz Konieczny is the dashing count who sweeps Arabella off her feet.
Nothing is for forever. And people make mistakes. And yet, letting go is the hardest challenge when you're burning with love for the first time and want nothing more than to hold on to it forever. But can you feel as intensely forever as you did in the beginning? Così fan tutte in Benedict Andrews’s new production deals with the exuberant feelings that drive young love in the rush of hormones. Sometimes it touches the fringes of human relationships, where one threatens to lose oneself in the search for intensity. Thus the two young couples, who think they have already discovered the essence of true love, meet two experienced counterparts in Don Alfonso and Despina. An experiment begins in which the men put the fidelity of their partners to the test by playing a game of disguise. What remains is disillusionment. And the possibility of a painful realization: only freedom and the longing for union are certain. Disappointment and rejection are part of the game – because no love is ideal.
Mozart's opera The Marriage of Figaro performed live (and streamed) on the February 4, 2021.
New 2019 version of the Kasper Holten’s 2014 production of Don Giovanni for the Royal Opera offers a glimpse inside the mind of one of opera’s most notorious seducers. With a spectacular revolving set by award winning designer Es Devlin, ingenious video projections by Luke Halls, and an ‘ideal cast on world beating form’ (The Independent), this staging brings Mozart’s dazzling score to life, in all its wit, glamour, and darkness.
Triumphantly premiered in 1724 at the King's Theatre in London, George Frideric Handel's Giulio Cesare in Egitto masterfully combines human emotions: Triumph with sorrow, despair with happiness and love with profound melancholy in the face of the transience of all earthly life. Star director Keith Warner creates a production that imaginatively blends silent film and baroque opera, delightfully echoing Mankiewicz's legendary Cleopatra with Elizabeth Taylor, Rex Harrison and Richard Burton. An excellent cast of singers is led by two of the world's leading countertenors: Bejun Mehta and Christophe Dumaux. Louise Alder shines as the seductive Cleopatra. Patricia Bardon, Simon Bailey and Jake Arditti are further highlights in this extraordinary group of singers, while Ivor Bolton provides the appropriate soundtrack on the podium of the Concentus Musicus Wien.
Live from Covent Garden will celebrate ballet and opera in programmes of dance and music, curated by artistic directors of the Royal Opera House: Antonio Pappano, Music Director of The Royal Opera, Oliver Mears, Director of Opera, and Kevin O’Hare, Director of The Royal Ballet.
Xerxes is one of Handel’s latest and most frequently performed operas, famous for its marvelous opening aria ‘Ombra mai fu’. At the centre of the confusing tragicomedy, very loosely based upon the life of Xerxes I of Persia, is a powerful and lovesick royal eccentric, King Xerxes. Rising opera star Gaëlle Arquez in the title role of Xerxes ‘scintillates with her nimble, luminous mezzo-soprano’, singing ‘irresistibly beautiful, impassioned, furious – but never mean’ (Frankfurter Rundschau). Frankfurt’s excellent Opera and Museum Orchester contributes ‘all sorts of refinements’ to this ‘musical smash hit’ (Deutschlandfunk) and ‘In Frankfurt Tilman Köhler ensures a three-hour short abundant and furious banquett … a great evening of opera’ (Deutschlandfunk).
