2014 is also the 300th anniversary of Christoph Willibald Gluck’s birth. Two opera houses in the place where he worked are anticipating this anniversary with new productions: the first is at Theater an der Wien on 8 November with the rarely-performed Iphigenie en Aulide (Torsten Fischer/Alessandro de Marchi), followed by the Staatsoper, which stages the Paris version of Alceste beginning on 12 November (Christof Loy/Ivor Bolton).

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.