

In 2016, Opera North’s extraordinary journey through Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen came full circle, in a series of six full Ring cycles. Comprising the four operas which make up Wagner’s epic masterpiece, Das Rheingold, Die Walküre, Siegfried and Götterdämmerung, more than 15 unforgettable hours of music and passion are now also available online, in full, for free....

The Galilean Princess Salome is one of the mythical female figures in Western cultural history. Her erotic dance in front of her stepfather Herod is already mentioned in the gospels of the Bible, for whom she has the severed head of John the Baptist brought on a bowl in return....

Herbert Wernicke's production of Richard Strauss's "Der Rosenkavalier", filmed live at the Festspielhaus Baden-Baden on 31 January 2009. Renée Fleming is the Marschallin, Diana Damrau is Sophie, Sophie Koch is Octavian, Franz Hawlata is Baron Ochs, Franz Grundheber is Faninal, Jane Henschel is Annina, and Jonas Kaufmann is the Italian singer. Christian Thielemann conducts the Münchner Philharmoniker....

Since it's premiere in a tiny suburban theatre in Vienna, Die Zauberflote has delighted audiences young and old for over 200 years. Mozart's Singspiel seamlessly alternates seriousness and jollity, and combines philosophical ideas with a fairytale world of wondrous animals and magical musical instruments. Emanuel Schikaneder's original production was theatrically inventive, and this new interpretation from director Simon McBurney emulates that in fresh and current terms. Fusing music, technology...

Penderecki's Opera of an entire convent, in the small French village of Loudun, apparently possessed by the devil....

A performance of Alban Berg's opera recorded at the Schiller Theater in Berlin. The opera, dark and satirical in tone, charts the story of the rise and fall of a femme fatale, from life as a society hostess to prostitution and, eventually, a bloody death at the hands of Jack the Ripper....

As bright and colorful as penny candy, this visually arresting production of Engelbert Humperdinck's "Hansel und Gretel" puts a twist on the classic fairy tale upon which it's based by uprooting the action to modern times. Director Laurent Pelly's interpretation, which premiered at Glyndebourne in 2008, finds Hansel, Gretel and their family taking shelter in a cardboard box while the witch's stock of goodies lines the shelves of a supermarket....

At the Bayerische Staatsoper in Munich, Kirill Petrenko conducts this new production of Alban Berg's Lulu, directed for stage by Dmitri Tcherniakov and starring the soprano Marlis Petersen (Lulu)....

Ludwig van Beethoven, Johannes Brahms, Béla Bartók: Three masters of modernity, three masters of orchestral composition brought to life by Internationally-acclaimed Russian conductor Tugan Sokhiev, Music Director and Chief Conductor of the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow and Music Director of Orchestre National du Capitole de Toulouse (ONCT) since 2008. Richard Strauss’ penultimate, satirically mythological opera Die Liebe der Danae (The Love of Danae, after a draft by Hugo von Hoffmansthal. The Wien...

The soldier Wozzeck (Christian Gerhaher) flits through a world that he is unable to decipher. The doctor torments him with absurd medical experiments; the captain humiliates and ridicules him. And Wozzeck’s lover, Marie (Gun-Brit Barkmin), with whom he has a child, cuckolds him with the drum major. Wozzeck becomes a murderer, stabbing Marie to death. Georg Büchner’s drama fragment, on which Alban Berg based his first opera, is an unflinching case study of social injustice and human suffering. Bu...

The La Scala Rheingold in May 2010 inaugurated Guy Cassiers Ring-Cycle and introduces a completely new paradigm to this work. While before him Patrice Chéreau had laid his focus on a historical analysis from 1870 to 1930 Germany, Guy Cassiers’ Ring unfolds “from our own present-day moment; it [takes] place in ‘the now’, the Jetztzeit (Walter Benjamin), placing our present and our future into the context of the promises and curses that we have inherited from history … The Cassiers Ring shows how ...

Rarely has a theatrical world premiere been so warmly received as Dutch National Opera’s production of Arnold Schönberg’s late-Romantic Gurre-Lieder in 2014. The production fulfilled a fervent wish of principal conductor Marc Albrecht. The music of Gurre-Lieder is timeless, and so is its subject: a passionate, yet forbidden love. The story harks back to a Scandinavian saga, situated in Gurre. King Waldemar loves the girl Tove, who is a mysterious character, connected to both the world of people ...

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Der Ring des Nibelungen in a production of the Zürich opera house, recorded 2024. "Dramatic music-making at its finest". In the hands of General Music Director Gianandrea Noseda and Stage Director Andreas Homoki, Wagner's myth is represented as "a dysfunctional family of gods" (The Independent) in a polished yet unpretentious production that underscores the humanity of the characters, who are performed by the same exceptional cast of singers across all four operas....

Der Ring des Nibelungen in a production of the Zürich opera house, recorded 2024. "Dramatic music-making at its finest". In the hands of General Music Director Gianandrea Noseda and Stage Director Andreas Homoki, Wagner's myth is represented as "a dysfunctional family of gods" (The Independent) in a polished yet unpretentious production that underscores the humanity of the characters, who are performed by the same exceptional cast of singers across all four operas....

In the spring of 2024, the Berliner Philharmoniker, under the direction of their chief conductor Kirill Petrenko, presented a staged production of Richard Strauss’s thrilling and dark opera Elektra – the highlight of the Baden-Baden Easter Festival. The title role was sung by the acclaimed soprano Nina Stemme. Philipp Stölzl, who has caused a sensation with his spectacular productions on the lake stage at the Bregenz Festival, was the director and set designer....

An early baroque masterpiece, Monteverdi's L’incoronazione di Poppea was inspired by The Annals by Tacitus and celebrates the love of the emperor Nero and the courtesan Poppea. Filmed at the 2008 Glyndebourne Festival, Robert Carsen’s production brings together Danielle de Niese, Alice Coote and the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment under the direction of Emmanuelle Haïm....