The church opera Ich Hiob („I, Job“) by Thomas Daniel Schlee, who was awarded the Grand Austrian State Prize for Music 2010 earlier this year, has been performed at the Kasseler Musiktage in the Alte Brüderkirche, Kassel. In Ich, Hiob, Schlee bridges the gap between different genres. The entire action of the work centres around the character of Job, “whose profoundly human experience of suffering is”, according to the composer, “familiar to each and every one of us, to some extent at least”. The role of the protagonist in the Kassel performance is sung by Markus Schäfer (tenor), and the conductor is Daniel Geiss.

Soprano Marisol Montalvo and Markus Bellheim (piano) gave the first performance of septemberalbum. lieder für sopran und klavier after texts by Ron Winkler on 7 November at the Kasseler Musiktage. The composer describes Winkler’s lyric poetry as “unagitated, fragile, sometimes rather laconic – simply beautiful”. He has striven to create a music which “should be tender and unassuming, and reflects the vital lightness of these almost wafted words.” septemberalbum received its Swiss Premiere on 15 November in the Gare du Nord in Basel. Philipp Maintz’s opera Maldoror was performed at the Theater Basel until 22 November.

Zurich Opera presents a masterpiece of the comic opera repertoire in the New Year, Gioachino Rossini’s Le comte Ory. The role of the Countess will be sung by star mezzo Cecilia Bartoli. In this new production (first performance: 23 January 2011) the recently-published critical edition by the French musicologist Damien Colas will be heard for the first time. In it, the original version of this opera has been reconstructed with the help of the original performance material. As a result, several numbers differ considerably from the version currently in use and enable us to recognize the references to Il viaggio a Reims more clearly than previously.  A milestone in our understanding of Rossini.

George Frideric Handel composed the large-scale secular serenata Aci, Galatea e Polifemo for a ducal wedding in Naples in July 1708. The libretto is based on Ovid’s Metamorphoses and is about the love between the sea nymph Galatea and the shepherd Acis, who is destroyed by the Cyclops Polyphemus. This early masterwork will be presented for the first time using the Halle Handel Edition in a performance given by René Jacobs and the Akademie für Alte Musik in the Schiller-Theater, Berlin on 5 and 6 February.

The rediscovery of the operas of Francesco Cavalli for the contemporary stage is constantly gathering momentum. With Eliogabalo, Theater Dortmund has chosen a work with an explosive subject matter and title-role. Its Venetian premiere, planned for the carnival season in 1667/68, was cancelled at short notice, and the work only received its first performance in 1999 in Cavalli’s birthplace of Crema. The new Dortmund production planned for 9 October 2011 is based on the critical new edition by Mauro Calcagno published by Bärenreiter. The production is by Katharina Thoma, and the musical director is Fausto Nardi.

(20.11.2012) Cecilia Bartoli’s latest CD “Mission” (Decca), a passionate vindication of the composer Agostino Steffani, contains five arias and duets alone from his opera Niobe, regina di Tebe. In 2008 Thomas Hengelbrock presented Steffani’s last Munich opera in a highly-acclaimed new production at the Schwetzingen Festival, subsequently performed in 2010 in Luxemburg and at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, London. In association with this performance project, a critical edition of Niobe, with complete performance material, has been published by Edition Balthasar Neumann, which is available from Alkor Edition Kassel. This offers an authoritative basis for further new productions and the long-overdue complete recording of this masterpiece of early Baroque opera.

The desert is the intellectual focal point of Beat Furrer’s new music theatre project which received its premiere at Theater Basel – the desert as a place of the completely alien, of not-being, of absence of memory, of death. Beat Furrer opens windows on this “placeless place”.