For the past fifteen years, we have chosen
an optimum spring week of the Vienna State Opera’s season
for our annual visit to Austria’s vibrant music capital.
Last year’s program was completely sold out due to the
unusual repertoire and the thrilling international casts,
with the ensemble of the revered Vienna Philharmonic in the
pit each evening, and we expect a similar response for our
May 2010 schedule of five major operas and one ballet. All
of our performances this year will be at the venerable Staatsoper.
In
addition, we are fortunate that our schedule enables us to
include the traditional Hofburg Palace Mass sung by the Vienna
Choirboys and a performance by the renowned Lipizzaner stallions
in the Spanish Riding School.
ALL
PERFORMANCES AT THE VIENNA STATE OPERA NOW FEATURE SIMULTANEOUS
ENGLISH TITLES. THE TITLES ARE SIMILAR TO THE MET’S,
IN FRONT OF EACH SEAT RATHER THAN OVER THE STAGE.
We
have selected this week because of the irresistible variety
of the Vienna State Opera repertory. Our five operatic productions
will embrace the remarkable variety of Rossini’s ‘bel
canto’ comedy, L’Italiana in Algeri; a new production
of Verdi’s Shakespearean tragedy, Macbeth; Richard Strauss’
one-act melodrama, Salome; Tchaikovsky’s lyric version
of Pushkin’s romance, Eugene Onegin; and Wagner’s
towering music-drama, Lohengrin. And on our final night, we
are fortunate to encounter the full-length MacMillan/Liszt
ballet entitled Mayerling, which recreates the tragedy of
Crown Prince Rudolf’s suicide in the Vienna Woods in
the winter of 1889.
The
international casts will feature a number of Europe’s
leading operatic stars in their favorite roles: Silvia Tro
Santafé and Ferruccio Furlanetto in Rossini’s
‘opera buffo’; Erika Sunneghard opposite Simon
Keenlyside as the ambitious Macbeths; Nancy Gustafson as Strauss’
lascivious Judaean princess; Olga Guryakova, Dmitri Hvorostovsky
and Ferruccio Furlanetto as Tchaikovsky’s protagonists;
and Soile Isokoski, Waltraud Meier and Peter Seiffert rising
to the Wagnerian challenge of ‘Lohengrin’. Our
esteemed conductors will include Seiji Ozawa, Daniele Gatti,
Leif Segerstam, and Dan Ettinger. Perhaps only in Vienna is
it possible to encounter a repertoire of such unusual interest
and high quality within the space of a single week.
May
is an ideal month to discover Vienna’s gourmet restaurants
and priceless museums, and to enjoy the luxury of the renowned
Sacher Hotel adjacent to the Staatsoper.
Monday,
May 24th, departure from New York’s Kennedy Airport
at 5:50 p.m. on Austrian Airlines flight # 88, arriving in
Vienna at 8:35 a.m. on the morning of the 25th. Or independent
travel to Vienna.
