Cavalli’s Orione is great fun, precisely because the opera differs from what we might expect from a mid-17th century work. The Urtext edition published as part of the Cavalli Complete Edition by Bärenreiter offers a starting-point for entertaining performances.

The circumstances surrounding the composition of Handel’s opera Lucio Cornelio Silla are not clear. But because of its interesting characters and outstanding music, it deserves a new chance. The Handel Festival Halle is reviving the work this summer.

(30.4.2015) On 10 May Beat Furrer’s new opera la bianca notte / die helle nacht after Dino Campana will be premiered in Hamburg. The poet, who narrates in order to survive, becomes the inspiration for a music theatre work which deals with the question of identity. The textual basis are the Canti orfici by Dino Campana, who allowed the futuristic ideas of his time to flow into poetic texts full of suggestive power. The conductor at the Hamburg Staatsoper is Simone Young.

(25.2.2015) Theater Magdeburg is exploring new territory with the first German performance of an opera by the Czech composer Zdeněk Fibich (1850–1900). Nevěsta messinská (The Bride of Messina) receives its first performance on 14 March 2015 in the opera house in Magdeburg. Alongside Smetana and Dvořak, Fibich is regarded as one of the three most important Czech opera composers of the Romantic period.  In his opera, based on Schiller’s tragedy, he follows the intentions of the classical theatre reformer, and combines dramatic choral scenes with convincing role portrayals and the leitmotivic-psychological interpretation of characters and situations.

(28.4.2015) In 1930 Ernst Krenek wrote his opera Kehraus um St. Stephan, in which he sketched an unsparing panorama of the time and its people, in the “manner of Karl Kraus”, as he later described it. The piece was taken up, then in turn rejected and finally only premiered in 1990. The “satire with music” to Krenek’s own libretto reveals a social collection of curios from the years following the lost First World War, when the opportunity for a revolution was thrown away, economic troubles and political uncertainties had a devastating effect and a society of black marketeers and post-war winners developed. The work receives its German premiere at the Stadttheater Gießen on 16 May 2015. The musical director is  Florian Ziemen, and director is Hans Hollmann.

(1.10.2014) A cosmopolitan and Czech - in his manifold work for music theatre Bohuslav Martinů always stays rooted in his native country. In his greatest compositions - from Juliette up to Mirandolina - he created a masterful art of characterization.

(1.10.2014) Three works have just been newly published in the Complete Edition of Jean-Philippe Rameau, celebrating the 250 anniversary of his death: Dardanus 1739, the opera Le Temple de la Gloire after Voltaire as well as Les Fêtes de l’Hymen et de l’Amour, his ballet music from 1747.