Wolfgang Ablinger-Sperrhacke

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.

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.

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 and stagecraft, this exciting production gives Die Zauberflote a refreshing new treatment that is both thrilling and simple in it's approach. Following an overwhelming success on stage, McBurney's unique production received five-star reviews in the Dutch press: 'a feast for the eyes and the ears' (Het Parool) and 'Delicious!' (Trouw).

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 Wiener Philharmoniker play under the baton of Franz Welser-Möst, under whom they “conveyed the glittering colors and lyrical intricacies of Strauss’s late score” (NY Times).

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).

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. But it is also a grotesque piece that thrives on exaggeration – and in which only a fine line separates the unfathomable from the ridiculous. Accordingly, director Andreas Homoki forgoes all realism.

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.

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 and the world of birds. The queen is jealous and has Tove killed. The Wood Dove tells of this in a moving song and the king accuses God of cruelty. A nightmarish scene follows, of a fierce army killed in battle, which rampages like a horde of ghosts. The radiant dawn at the end of Gurre-Lieder shows the insignificance of human destiny compared to the power of nature.

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.

Bernd Alois Zimmermann - Die Soldaten

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.

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 the globalized moment of 2010 continues to build on the Wagnerian vocabularies of 1870.” (Michael Steinberg) Cast with a number of opera stars like René Pape, Stephan Rügamer, Johannes Martin Kränzle and Anna Larsson and conducted by Daniel Barenboim, this Rheingold is bound to put the audience under its spell.

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