(10.6.2014) Performances of Franz Schubert’s most important opera continue to be rare events. So this year’s Salzburg Festival project to stage Fierabras in a highly promising new production and encourage debate about it once more is all the more remarkable. The director is Peter Stein, and conductor Ingo Metzmacher. The musicians of the Vienna Philharmonic will be playing from performance material from the New Schubert Edition specially produced for this production by Bärenreiter-Verlag. The first performance in the Haus für Mozart is on 13 August.

(31.5.2014) The 2014 Handel Festival in Halle again sees two first performances using the Halle Handel Edition (HHA). This year’s new opera production on 6 June features Handel’s seldom-performed Arminio of 1737, conducted by Bernhard Forck and directed by Nigel Lowery. The oratorio Solomon follows a week later, performed on 11 June in the Marktkirche. Top soloists, the Kölner Kammerchor and the Collegium Cartusianum perform, conducted by Peter Neumann. In addition, the Halle Handel Edition (HHA) features prominently in this year’s programme, with Amadigi, Riccardo Primo, Giove in Argo and a revival of the 2013 production of Almira.

Gluck’s beginnings as a composer of opera seria are now overshadowed by his ‘reform’ operas. Demofoonte, now being published in the Gluck Complete Works, offers an excellent opportunity for theatres to become more familiar with Gluck’s early works.

Solomon, Handel’s late oratorio in English, sparkles not only because of its stirring plot, but also through musical tableaus of great variety. Now this major work has been published as part of the Handel Complete Edition.

(26.11.2013) The operas of Franz Schubert are still rarely performed on the stage or in the concert hall. So two forthcoming performance projects devoted to these works are all the more notable. Well-known vocal soloists and the Munich Radio Orchestra conducted by Christopher Hogwood present two early seldom-performed Singspiels in concert performances on 8 December in the Prinzregententheater, Munich: Der vierjährige Posten (using performance material from the New Schubert Edition for the first time) and Die Zwillingsbrüder. By contrast, the Theater an der Wien presents a staged production of the religious drama Lazarus, which survives in fragmentary form. The first performance takes place in Vienna on 11 December. Michael Boder conducts the Vienna Symphony Orchestra and the Arnold Schoenberg Choir, and the director is Claus Guth.

Artemisia, written in 1657, is a stage work overflowing with external and internal action. The new edition, part of the Cavalli Edition, offers a wealth of material for performances, based on discoveries made in studying the sources.

(19.9.2013) The 300th anniversary of Gluck’s birth, born on 2 July 1714 in Erasbach near Nuremberg, is being marked in many places this season. This starts on 3 November 2013 in the Bayer Kulturhaus Leverkusen with a concert performance of Gluck’s La clemenza di Tito with L’Arte del mondo conducted by Werner Ehrhardt, followed on 10 November by Frankfurt Opera with its first performance of the Prague version of Ezio (Vincent Boussard / Christian Curnyn). On 8 February 2014 the first performance of Atto d'Orfeo, the Parma version of Orfeo ed Euridice, will be given at Göteborg Opera. Laurence Cummings conducts using pre-publication material from the Gluck Complete Works, specially prepared for this performance by Gabriele Buschmeier. The director is David Radok.