With Coronavirus to thank for several years of skimmed or semi-skimmed opera seasons, it’s a joy to see a return to the real full-fat thing. With ten new opera productions (nine for adults, one for children) and a highly anticipated ballet world premiere, no one can call into question the calorific value of Zurich Opera and Ballet’s 2023–24 season.
The most eagerly awaited of those new productions will be the final episode of their Intendant Andreas Homoki and Music Director Gianandrea Noseda’s Zurich Ring. Göterdammerung opens on 5th November. Previous episodes have been strongly sung and the production will appeal to those disenchanted with the crossword-puzzle solving process required by several recent productions. As our review of Rheingold put it: “For Andreas Homoki, Wagner used myth ‘not as a means to convey some political idea, but rather to broaden his base and address humanity as a whole’”.
Fans of Klaus Florian Vogt’s silvery tenor will flock to see his Siegfried, particularly when paired with equally sweet-voiced Camilla Nylund as Brünnhilde. There will then be the first chance to see two full Ring cycles in May, with strong casts: in addition to Vogt and Nylund, the May performances feature Tomasz Konieczny, one of the top Wotans of the moment, Wolfgang Ablinger-Sperrhacke, always a brilliant Mime, and Christopher Purves as Alberich.
The season starts at the other end of the operatic scale with the Swiss premiere of La rondine, Puccini’s only full length opera to steer away from high drama to comedy. But Puccini’s comedy is fittingly bittersweet and La rondine contains plenty of glorious swelling strings and haunting melodies. You can expect a full-hearted Magda from Ermonela Jaho, a suitably Italianate rendering of the score from Marco Armiliato, and a focus on the characters’ inner psychology from director Christof Loy.
Also on the lighter side, the inimitable Barrie Kosky turns his hand to Franz Lehár’s operetta The Merry Widow in February. Expect the unexpected from Kosky, who hardly ever fails to find a new and thought-provoking directorial angle. Another new comedy production is Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which director Rainer Holzapfel is staging at Theater Winterthur, a half hour train ride from central Zurich, with members of Zurich’s International Opera Studio.
There isn’t an operatic world premiere in the season, but Amerika is an opera you won’t have seen before: based on Kafka’s unfinished novel with all its absurdities, Roman Haubenstock-Ramati’s “auditory, visual, and intellectual adventure, which challenges all the senses” has only been staged twice since its Berlin premiere in 1969.
For Baroque opera fans, the hottest ticket will be Emmanuelle Haïm and Jetske Mijnssen’s collaboration on Rameau’s Platée, following on from their previous Zurich production of Hippolyte et Aricie, which earned five stars from our reviewer Rainer Zerbst for superb singing and staging (“The subtle direction of the characters gives them the grandeur of ancient tragedy”). There’s also a new Monteverdi L’Orfeo, which is director Evgeny Titov’s second production for Zurich Opera: Titov is spanning the centuries, since L’Orfeo is the oldest of operas and his first was George Benjamin’s Lessons in Love and Violence, completed in 2017.