(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. 

OPERA marks the beginning of a new kind of publishing project of music theatre works, which demonstrates an enquiring editorial approach to typical works.

(10.6.2013) This year’s new opera production at the Handel Festival is devoted to his first stage work, Almira, which the 20-year-old composer wrote for the Oper am Gänsemarkt in Hamburg – with clear references to Venetian opera, such as the characteristic mix of serious and comic scenes. His wonderful sense of melodic invention, to which he frequently returned,  is already found here. Due to the recent floods, the premiere of Axel Köhler’s new production has had to be postponed and will now take place on 21 June. Andreas Spering will conduct this first performance using the Halle Handel Edition.

(10.2.2013) Dresden-born composer Torsten Rasch, better known in Britain and published by Faber Music London, is now attracting increasing attention in Germany. In 2010 he set The Duchess of Malfi by Shakespeare’s contemporary John Webster for English National Opera and the innovative theatre company Punchdrunk. On 23 March 2013 German opera-lovers will have the opportunity of getting to know the work, so successfully premiered in London, in a new production by Dietrich Hilsdorf for Theater Chemnitz. Music Director Frank Beermann conducts the Robert Schumann Philharmonie, which gave the premiere of Rasch’s orchestral work Wouivres in October 2011. Complementing the opera production, the orchestra premieres Das Haus der Temperamente, a suite from The Duchess of Malfi on 17 April 2013.

Gluck’s ballet Les Amours d’Alexandre et de Roxane is published in the Complete Edition.

No fewer than 28 operas by Francesco Cavalli, the famous Monteverdi pupil of his day, survive. The edition Francesco Cavalli – Opere reveals this early Baroque world once more.

Andrea Lorenzo Scartazzini’s opera Der Sandmann, after themes by E. T. A. Hoffmann, receives its German premiere on 18 September at the Frankfurt Opera, taking over from the Theater Basel Christof Loy's original production. Like his first work in the genre, WUT, Scartazzini’s second opera introduces an equally exciting subject to the operatic stage. The libretto is by Thomas Jonigk, who transfers the story of the Sandman to the present, setting it in the milieu of a budding writer who inhabits a world between delusion and reality. The conductor in Frankfurt is Hartmut Keil. Further performances after the premiere are scheduled for 24 and 30 September, 3, 8, 13 and 23 October 2016. – Der Sandmann has just been released on CD: Musiques Suisses, MGB 6288. (photo: Janis Huber)