In the run-up to the Rameau anniversary year in 2014 marking the 250th anniversary of the composer’s death, his rarely-performed one-act ballet Anacréon will be presented by vocal soloists, the Choir of Magdalen College and the renowned Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment. Jonathan Huw Williams conducts the first performance of his new edition of the work, published in the Opera Omnia Rameau, in a concert performance on 9 November in the Sheldonian Theatre Oxford.

(22.11.2014) The Volkstheater Rostock is offering a special bel canto highlight on 9 January 2015, a concert performance of Rossini’s oper Maometto II using the new Critical Edition by Hans Schellevis. On the podium is the renowned English Rossini specialist David Parry, who conducted this seldom-performed opera last year at the Garsington Festival and has recorded it on CD.

Handel set his opera Poro in distant India. However, the conflicts that develop in it are universally applicable and enabled Handel to express through it his entire compositional maturity.

Even before its premiere, Smetana began to alter his comic opera The Bartered Bride, the beginning of a long series of transformations and versions. An introduction on the publication of newly-set performance material from Bärenreiter Praha.

[16.02.2012] Leoš Janáček’s artistic opera Osud, which the composer never heard staged during his lifetime, returns to the place where it received its German premiere. The work was first performed in a staged version in October 1958 on consecutive days in Brno and in Stuttgart. The revised edition, published as part of the Janáček Complete Edition, will be used in the staging by the new production team at the Stuttgart Opera: Sylvain Cambreling conducts Fate: Destiny – Osud in the production by Jossi Wieler and Sergio Morabito. Janáček’s “theatrical work, emerging entirely out of the spirit of his music, whose lyrical and dramatic high points are amongst the great, unique moments of his output in their originality,” is presented with another Expressionist artistic drama, Schoenberg’s “Die glückliche Hand”. The first performance takes place on 11 March 2012.

Which is the opera where everything ends with a triad, with a ménage à trois in mutual agreement? This is the surprising ending in Adolphe Adam’s Le Toréador. And the music too offers a breath of fresh air – brilliant and elegant orchestral writing with great powers of seduction.

Robert Didion’s critical new edition of Jacques Offenbach’s La Belle Hélène, in which the original version of this Opéra bouffe has been reconstructed for the first time based on the autograph manuscript, continues to attract considerable interest through productions in Germany and further afield. The first of these is a new production at the Stadttheater Bielefeld on 27 November directed by Bruno Klimek and conducted by Witolf Werner; this is followed on 16 December by the Stadttheater Biel-Solothurn (production: Vincent Tavernier, conductor: Harald Siegel).