PENTATONE presents Telemanns rarely-performed opera Miriways (1728) with a stellar cast and the Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin conducted by Bernard Labadie. Star vocalists such as Andre Morsch (Miriways), Robin Johannsen (Sophi), Sophie Karthäuser (Bemira), Lydia Teuscher (Nisibis) and Michael Nagy (Murzah) offer a string of beautiful baroque arias and scenes in this German-language opera. Miriways is a piece about love, duty and truthfulness, and was based on recent political events in Afghanistan and Persia that actually made headlines in European newspapers, demonstrating the eighteenth-century fascination for the Orient. The opera was recorded live during the Telemann Festival Hamburg in 2017. The Akademie für Alte Musik is generally seen as one of the best period-instruments ensembles of today, and has a substantial PENTATONE discography, including CANTATA with Bejun Mehta (2018), as well as Handels Concerti grossi op. 6 (released in 2019 and 2020). Robin Johannsen featured on Handels Parnasso in festa (2017). Andre Morsch, Sophie Karthäuser, Lydia Teuscher, Michael Nagy and Bernard Labadie make their PENTATONE debut.
Mozarts third venture into the opera seria genre, demolished its traditional boundaries to open the way to lyric drama. Blending youthful earnestness with mature mastery, Mozart uses – while profoundly changing – the elements of a genre based on arias that come one after another with no real concern for dramatic progression. The importance and expressive power of the choruses, influenced by the operatic reforms of Gluck, foreshadows The Magic Flute. Idomeneo is often regarded as Mozarts first masterpiece for the opera house. After the fall of Troy, King Idomeneo can finally dream of returning to his homeland after a long absence, during which his son Idamante ensured the continuity of his reign and guarded Trojan prisoners, including Ilia, King Priams daughter. To escape from a terrible storm that is keeping him from reaching Crete, Idomeneo promises Neptune to sacrifice the first living being he encounters upon landing. Unfortunately, it is his own son who greets him in his native land. By offering her own life in exchange for that of Idamante, whom she loves and who loves her, Illia manages to get Neptune to yield and to deliver Idomeneo from his fateful vow. Robert Carsens politically poetic staging (Opera News), set in present-day Crete, features a first-rate cast including Eric Cutler as Idomeneo, David Portillo as Idamante, Anett Fritsch, as Ilia, Eleonora Buratto, as Elettra, and Benjamin Hulett as Arbace.
Opera buffa in four acts K. 492 by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791) with text by Lorenzo Da Ponte (1749–1838) after Pierre Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais’s play La Folle Journée, ou Le Mariage de Figaro (1778)
The first D minor chords thunder ominously from the orchestra pit, while on the stage, the entrance hall of an elegant hotel appears, symbolic of a place of non-committal encounters. Luxury seeps from every pore of the stairs, galleries and mysterious doors – the perfect place for Don Giovanni’s exercises in seduction. Director Sven-Eric Bechtolf pulls off a brilliant coup with the high aesthetics of his intrigue, a masterful parody of the “everything is possible” of our time – flanked by an ensemble of exquisite vocal talents. Ildebrando D’Arcangelo, testosterone-charged Latin lover, amounts “with his splendid timbre and his stunningly virile magnetism to what must be an ideal realization of Don Giovanni” (Neue Zürcher Zeitung). With his finely balanced voice, Luca Pisaroni as an intellectually bespectacled Leporello. “The powerful bass of Commendatore Tomasz Konieczny is a true sensation” (Frankfurter Rundschau). The female roles are all realized with elegantly lean voices: Anett Fritsch highly dramatic as Elvira, the Donna Anna of Lenneke Ruitens supple in her vocal line and Valentina Nafornia “a wonderful Zerlina who radiates strong vocal sensuality” (Opernnetz).
Staged by 2013 Oscar winner Michael Haneke. Michael Haneke’s film Amour won an Oscar for best foreign-language film, the film too won 4 Césars, Palme d’Or (Cannes) and a Golden Globe.
Skin-tight rubber and lacrosse sticks bring contemporary chic to this timeless fantasy of warriors and witches in Robert Carsen’s fun-filled transformation of Handel’s first London triumph. Conducting from the keyboard just as Handel himself did, Ottavio Dantone leads a youthful cast of today’s luminaries in the dramatic art of Baroque opera, the ‘affecting’ Sonia Prina, the ‘unadorned intensity’ of Anett Fritsch and ‘fire-breathing flair’ (The Observer) of Brenda Rae.