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”.

The Hannover-Herrenhausen Arts Festival is offering a real operatic rarity on 26 June with Francesco Cavalli’s dramma per musica  L'Artemisia, first performed in Venice in 1657. For the first performance in modern times, Cavalli specialist Hendrik Schulze has prepared a critical edition which Claudio Cavina and his ensemble La Venexiana use in their interpretation. A further performance is planned for 24 July at the Festival de Radio France et Montpellier Languedoc-Roussillon, which will be followed by a CD recording. The full score and performance material of L’Artemisia are published by Bärenreiter in their new series “Opere di Francesco Cavalli”.

Ambroise Thomas initially conceived the role of Hamlet for high male voice, and wrote the first sketches in the tenor clef. When it became known that the charismatic singer-actor Jean-Baptiste Faure was to play the part of Hamlet, the composer adapted the existing music for bass-baritone. Soon after the premiere in 1868 at the Académie Impériale de Musique in Paris, a vocal score of the tenor version was published, endorsed by Thomas, which he had probably even made himself. Reconstructed from the sources by Hugh Macdonald as part of his new edition of “Hamlet” for Bärenreiter · Alkor, this version can be heard for the first time on 15 July at the Festival Radio France Occitanie Montpellier. The American star tenor John Osborn sings the role of the Danish Prince. Michael Schønwandt conducts the chorus of the Opéra and the Orchestre National Montpellier Occitanie. The concert performance will be broadcast by Radio France at a later date.