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.
Andreas Homoki’s new Carmen opens in April. It’s set at the Opéra-Comique, the place of its premiere in 1883, and is also co-produced with them. The roster of new operas is completed in May by Calixto Bieito, who visits Zurich in May for a new staging of Verdi’s I vespri siciliani.
Over the Christmas period, there’s a wonderful-sounding new opera for children: Elena Kats-Chemin’s Jim Knopf und Lukas der Lokomotivführer is a magic tale of dangerous, dragon-ridden journeys to be told with puppet theatre.
The season’s final opera is a concert performance of Giordano’s Andrea Chénier starring Anja Harteros, Yonghoon Lee and Artur Ruciński. It’s a verismo piece set in the French Revolution, so it’s appropriate that the dates include 14th July!
The many opera revivals include Il turco in Italia with Olga Peretyatko, L’Italiana in Algeri with Cecilia Bartoli and Ildar Abdrazakov and Don Giovanni with Golda Schutz as Donna Anna.
28th April will be one of the most eagerly awaited dates in the world ballet calendar: it’s the premiere of Atonement, the first creation for Ballett Zürich by Cathy Marston, their incoming Artistic Director. Based on Ian McEwan’s successful 2001 novel, Marston promises to reflect “on the minor and major self-deceptions that shape our memories, and on the difficulty of dealing with guilt – the guilt of others, but especially our own”.
There’s more of Marston’s work in the shape of The Cellist, which originally premiered at The Royal Ballet in 2020 and her 2018 Snowblind, a “hopeless love triangle set in the wintery, hermetic world of an American village” based on Edith Wharton’s classic novel Ethan Frome, which forms part of a triple bill entitled Walkways which opens the season (and thus Marston’s Zurich tenure) on 6th October. Other triple bills follow in January and March.
There’s also a work by Marston’s predecessor Christian Spuck, whose choreography of Verdi’s Messa da Requiem is performed in February. Our 2019 review described it as “truly sublime” and “confrontational and haunting”. There are two other full length dance works in the season – Marcos Morau’s Nachtträume and Marco Goecke’s Nijinsky.
View Zurich Ballet and Opera’s 2023–24 season. This preview was sponsored by Zurich Ballet and Opera.
