All Galas

2020

Jury Talk / Round Table

2020 was a difficult year for everybody – opera, and the wider culture industries, included. Following our digital OPER! AWARDS, the jury sat down for a round table discussion and took a stock-check of the issues and challenges facing the opera world now and in (hopefully) post-corona times: from the social and economic relevance of the art form to audience engagement to salaries for opera creatives.

Interviews

Video interviews with our award winners:

Hanover State Opera

It took Laura Berman, the new director, no time at all to put the Hanover State Opera on the musical map as one the most interesting houses. Which is not to say that the proud building by Georg Ludwig Friedrich Laves and its cultural inner life had ever disappeared from it. But Berman runs the place without egocentric vanities, putting on performances for the whole town, relying not on supposedly big names but on high-quality titles as well as high-quality directors. And if the musical quality, too, is as convincing as it was for the opening night of Halévy’s La Juive you’re all but guaranteed attention well beyond the region.

Insights

Anita Rachvelishvili

Anita Rachvelishvili, the mezzo-soprano from Georgia, possesses and wields one of the greatest operatic voices for some decades. Larger than life, for her first CD she had to stand behind the orchestra so as not to drown out everything else. Yet Rachvelishvili knows how to downsize that voice, too, tracing out even the most delicate notes. She is self-confessedly old-school, upholding that ancient proverb: “There’s no school, but old school.” She is most likely the most important Carmen since Grace Bumbry and Agnes Baltsa. And the best Amneris since Fedora Barbieri. If the operatic mezzo is a thing again, it’s because of her!

Insights

Benjamin Bernheim

Benjamin Bernheim is French, grew up and trained in Switzerland, reached artistic maturity as a member of the Zurich Opera ensemble, then sharpened his profile with some smaller tenor parts in Salzburg. For the past two years the international career of the mid-thirties singer has really been taking off. His French repertoire is, as they say at home, formidable – underpinned by his lyrical voice, so strong in the high register, by his sensitive treatment of language as well as his metallic punch and a technically accomplished voix mixte. His forte at the moment are Gounod’s Faust (enchantingly beautiful on a recording of the original version for Palazzetto Bru Zane) and Massenet’s Des Grieux – both are sophisticated revelations!

Insights

Oksana Lyniv

Her workload until the first theatre lockdown in spring was considerable. As the outgoing music director in Graz, Oksana Lyniv prepared Weinberg’s The Passenger, gave her debut at the Berlin State Opera with Cherubini’s Medea and conducted the extraordinarily carefully analysed Bartók twin-premiere at the Bavarian State Opera. Unsparing but empathic, with the Bavarian State Orchestra she shaped a gripping interpretation of the sorrowful and unfathomable music of the Hungarian composer. This outstanding conductor delivers – with seriousness, vigour and precision.

Insights

Tobias Kratzer

It’s exactly what musical theatre needs these days, and urgently so: clever, thoughtful, yet entertaining interpretations. Tobias Kratzer and his set and costume team tick all these boxes perfectly. Why? Because he’s hardworking, original, hands-on and always ready to surprise. Because he knows his craft, though without putting on nerdy airs and graces, and because he’s fully committed to the present. He knows how to dress the old lady opera in dignified yet meaningful new outfits, up-to-date, aware of today’s topics and visual culture – whether its Verdi’s Forza del destino in Frankfurt, Tannhäuser in Bayreuth, Guillaume Tell in Lyon or Fidelio in London.

Wiener Philharmoniker

31 cancellations since April 2020, not a single opera performance – but then, on 1 August a resounding, exemplary reunion: the Elektra premiere at the Salzburg Festival, conducted by Franz Welser-Möst. What power, what a signal to an opera world that had been gagged for months! Consistently Covid-tested, the musicians fashioned themselves into a unified collective and fought for the right to make music without social distancing: go big or go home! The night after they raised the ante further with a magnificent production of Mozart’s Così fan tutte, led by Joana Mallwitz.

Insights

Choir of Cologne Opera

An opera house in provisional quarters requires flexibility and creativity from all its staff members. In Cologne, during this extraordinary season, it was in particular the opera choir that excelled with high musical standards despite the changeable spatial and acoustic conditions of its temporary venue, the Staatenhaus. To shine even off-stage in Verdi’s Trovatore is just as outstanding as is having to move continually across the stage in small groups in Brett Dean’s Hamlet. The choir of Cologne Opera has demonstrated versatility and a strong presence.

Insights

Macbeth Underworld – Théâtre de la Monnaie

In Brussels, Pascal Dusapin presented us with a surprise: his Shakespeare adaptation Macbeth Underworld at the Théâtre de la Monnaie. It was a short, intense night that director Thomas Jolly doused in darkness, set in a thicket of branches peppered with harsh white disco lights. It had chic, and a dash of musical irony by Jolly as much as Dusapin added zest to these Fearless Vampire Killers in the Scottish Highlands. Mr. and Mrs. Macbeth – the two wonderful, full-blooded tragico-comedians Georg Nigl and Magdalena Kožená – shambled through the scene like murderous phantoms, as funnily grotesque as they were tragically burlesque. Just like Dusapin’s seemingly eclectic score, tenderly painted by Alain Altinoglu’s baton.

Insights

Les Indes galantes – Opéra national de Paris

Jean-Philippe Rameau’s baroque revue Les Indes galantes at the Bastille Opera was transformed into a ravishing festival of life by the artist and film director Clément Cogitore. He offered stylised vignettes from a 21st-century multicultural metropolis – like Paris – while the splendid choreographer Bintou Dembélé cranked up the moves of her dancers, rappers and hip-hoppers. Baroque and banlieue, blending in an irresistible mix. A big part in this contemporary dance show of gavottes and menuets was also played by conductor Leonardo García Alarcón and his Cappella Mediterranea. Oh, and did we mention it? There was some very fine singing, too!

Insights

Ersan Mondtag

To make one’s directorial debut with a piece as difficult as Franz Schreker’s The Smith of Ghent (Der Schmied von Gent) suggests either total fearlessness, incredible naivety or towering self-confidence. Or possibly all of the above. However, the result was a breath-taking succession of images within the sets designed by Mondtag himself, which borrowed from picturesque, art historical Flanders clichés, but also presented the horrors of colonialism in a wild riot on the stage of the Opera Ballet Vlaanderen, in the process rescuing the opera from the misconception of being a minor late work of the composer.

Insights

Josa Marx

The technicolour imagery of director Ersan Mondtag for Schreker’s The Smith of Ghent (Der Schmied von Gent) would have worked only half as well without Josa Marx’s inventive costumes. Here, too, we find a childlike enjoyment of shapes and colours mixing with the fearsome elements of Dutch painting from Hieronymus Bosch to Pieter Bruegel. Josa Marx combined these suggestive references, from the past right up to the present, to create an unmistakable signature that enlivened Mondtag’s strikingly nested revolving stage in a congenial manner.

Insights

Piotr Beczała: Vincerò!

What a voice! With his solo album Vincerò!, Piotr Beczała – Best Singer of last year’s OPER! AWARDS – again stakes a claim to the throne of tenors. Exciting in his high registers that have become ever more free and assured in recent years, with a beautiful, glistening tear in the right moments. He shines with exemplary technique and well-tempered expression rather than high-pressure emotions in this verismo repertoire. Vincerò! is another successful step towards more dramatic parts in Beczała’s intelligently managed career.

Einblicke

Hector Berlioz: Benvenuto Cellini

A highlight of the Berlioz year 2019: John Eliot Gardiner’s Benvenuto Cellini, a live concert recording on DVD from the Opéra de Versailles. His conducting is cheerful, the Orchestre Revolutionnaire et Romantique whispers and blares with a rich timbre, the Monteverdi Choir is nimble and witty. All are full of fervour and perfectly cast, making it pure joy to listen to this, Berlioz’ most colourful, frivolous and multifaceted opera, set among the artists of Renaissance Rome. The vocal cherry on top: Michael Spyres sings Benvenuto with poise and charm and a well-rounded baritonal tenor voice. This recording is an opera must-have!

Insights

Bruno de Sá

The Brazilian Bruno de Sá might become the first male soprano to achieve a global career. He made a splash as little Mermaid in the Basel world premiere of Andersens Erzählungen (Andersen’s Tales), but also as Barbarina in Le nozze di Figaro. His contribution to the CD release of Bononcini’s Polifemo also told us to sit up and take notice. A solo recording contract soon followed. De Sá’s voice is soft, keeping its warmth even in the highest registers while eschewing mere vocal fireworks. Instead, we hear an extremely accomplished, extremely respectable singer doing pioneering work.

Insights

Lanzelot – Nationaltheater Weimar & Theater Erfurt

A dragon and a wild drama: Weimar and Erfurt, for the first time since 1971, resurrected Paul Dessau and Heiner Müller’s malicious polit-opera Lanzelot, in Peter Konwitschny’s striking and sleek direction. A dragon terrorises the land, each year it demands a virginal sacrifice. A knight, Lanzelot, turns up, but nobody really is much bothered, and the reigning nomenclature is quite ok with the state of things. This odd but piercing piece premiered in 1969 at the Berlin State Opera. As the GDR powers that were assumed the dragon to exemplify the capitalist West they applauded this “socialist revolutionary opera of human self-liberation”.

Salzburg Festival

Art, according to the Festival’s founding father Max Reinhardt, is “a celestial body of its own” – but one that “draws its light from the world of reality”. Confronted by a very real pandemic, the Salzburg Festival this year built on this insight. It declared art to be a “basic staple and central to the meaning of life”, deferred the decision about a would-be cancellation to the last possible starting date for rehearsals – and then went all in to make it all happen. Thus, the condensed 30 festival days became a beacon of happiness and lit up the entire culture business: yes, we can, despite everything else!

Junge Opern Rhein-Ruhr

Since 2013, the opera houses of Dortmund, Bonn and Düsseldorf have jointly commissioned family operas on a regular basis. It’s how Ronja, the Robber’s Daughter and Ghost Knights came about. This year’s Nils Karlsson Thumbling was presented as a roving playschool opera. The world premiere of the fairytale opera The Sultan’s Children had been planned for Dortmund in April. When this fell through, with irrepressible energy Junge Opern Rhein-Ruhr set up digital holiday and film projects instead, devised the “creative time-out” for primary school kids, and turned youngsters into opera composers. Exemplary!

Insights

Hans Neuenfels

A gnawed chicken leg will hardly cause outrage anymore. The times of scandal are past. But some things can still hit your solar plexus: among them, Hans Neuenfels’ readings of the opera repertoire – ageless, spirited, seamlessly derived from the flow of music and from the sensuous and precise analysis of his material. As could be seen again recently in Vienna, in Neuenfels’ re-staging of Mozart’s Abduction from the Seraglio. Since 1974 he has directed nearly 40 operas, from Rameau to Wagner, from Verdi to Trojahn – each one exactly once. Many of his productions were pathbreaking, all of them were unmistakable.

Insights

Music-Supporting Testing Laboratories

There was nothing normal about the 2020 opera season. Whenever some works could be performed with their (more or less) original cast and uncut, it was due to a close cooperation with science. Providing Covid-testing free of charge, businesses like TIB MOLBIOL Laboratories or Centogene made the impossible possible: despite the pandemic, even large-scale projects could take place, for example Die Walküre at Deutsche Oper Berlin or the concert and recording programme of Cappella Aquileia as part of the Heidenheim Opera Festival.

The lack of imagination and passive self-victimisation of opera houses during the pandemic

Can you make it through a crisis by burying your head in the sand? Many opera houses, especially at the beginning of the pandemic, seemed to think so. On the one hand, their artistic responses often demonstrated a perplexing lack of imagination; on the other, the treatment meted out to well-respected artists and other, often freelance, opera creatives was quite abysmal. More than just a few of our richly subsidised houses made themselves comfortable in their role of passive victim, demanding just the kind of solidarity from politics and society they denied their freelancers.

Program

You can find all award winners in our program booklet:

View Booklet