Eastern Bloc Hits Boston Opera Season With Two Big Works

Leos Janácek

"Boston has largely ignored one of the great opera composers of the 20th century: Leos Janácek. In 1985, Sarah Caldwell staged for her Opera Company of Boston one of Janácek’s masterpieces, The Makropoulos Case, a sinister yet mesmerizing story of a glamorous 300-year-old woman desperately trying to hang on to her life, starring one of the most glamorous and versatile sopranos of the century, Anja Silja. Couturier Fiandaca designed her costumes. The production was unforgettable and it got rave reviews. But it drew small audiences. In all my years of living in Boston, I’ve only seen one other staged production of a Janácek opera here — his heartbreaking animal fable The Cunning Little Vixen, in an imaginative and wonderfully performed student production at the Boston Conservatory two years ago — sung in the original Czech! Even the Met eventually discovered Janácek and has done several of his greatest operas. At the Boston Lyric Opera, our largest opera company, a plan to do a series of Janácek operas was scotched years ago by the previous administration. But BLO has now finally gotten

Karol Szymanowski

around to the Czech master. The third production of its 2014-2015 season will be the provincial romantic tragedy Kátya Kabanová (Shubert Theatre, March 13-22), one of the composer’s most beautiful and powerful scores, staged by Tim Albery and conducted by David Angus, the team responsible for BLO’s single most inspired production, Peter Maxwell Davies’s The Lighthouse, at the JFK Library in 2012."...."Another exciting opera from Eastern Europe, the Polish composer Karol Szymanowski’s 1926 King Roger, will have its Boston Symphony Orchestra debut at Symphony Hall, March 5-7. It will feature the Polish baritone and Metropolitan Opera star Mariusz Kwiecien, who has made a huge success in the title role from Paris to Santa Fe. Charles Dutoit conducts this luxuriously seductive and moving score, loosely based on Euripedes’s The Bacchae. It will be sung in Polish (as it should be), with English supertitles." [Source]

Diana Damrau Makes Late Entry Into Kristian Schuller MET Photos

(Click on all images to enlarge)

When the MET announced its 2015-16 season, their online brochure featured gorgeous photographs by Kristian Schuller for their new productions. One conspicuous omission was no photo of any artist for the new production of Bizet's Les pêcheurs de perles featuring Diana Damrau, Matthew Polenzani, and Mariusz Kwiecień. Perhaps because it is a co-production originally created by English National Opera? Although the Manon Lescaut is a co-production with Baden-Baden Festival and Kristine Opolais made the brochure deadline. Whatever the reason, the MET has released the promotional photo featuring the soprano as Leïla. A photo of Diana Damrau working with Kristian Schuller, as well as other high resolution images by the photographer for the new season, after the jump.

MET Sirius XM Radio Tonight: "Anna Bolena"

Listen to the Metropolitan Opera perform Donizetti's Anna Bolena live tonight at 8:30 PM EST on Sirius XM radio. Intermission guest: Mariusz Kwiecień.

Interview With the Three Male Leads of the MET "Don Giovanni"

The British (Grandage), Polish (Kwiecen) and Italian (Luisi)
will recreate the Spanish legend of Don Juan.
(Photo: Robert Wright/New York Times) 

Zachary Woolfe has an interesting conversation with the director (Tony Award-winner Michael Grandage), the maestro (Principal Conductor Fabio Luisi) and the Don Giovanni (baritone Mariusz Kwiecen) about the new production of Don Giovanni at the Metropolitan Opera: "Even if Mr. Grandage, 49, and Mr. Luisi, 53, bring fresh perspectives to the opera, it helps that they are working with singers well versed in the classic roles, including the baritone Mariusz Kwiecien, who had his breakthrough year at the Met in 2005 in two Mozart parts — the Count in Le Nozze di Figaro” and Guglielmo in Così Fan Tutte — under Mr. Levine. Mr. Kwiecien has made something of a specialty of the libertine Don." [Source]

Online Brochure Is Now Available For MET 2011-2012

Jonas Kaufmann as Faust (©Nick Heavican), Anna Netrebko as Anna Bolena (©Brigitte Lacombe), Mariusz Kwiecień as Don Giovanni (©Nick Heavican), Deborah Voigt as Brünnhilde (©Brigitte Lacombe), David Daniels as Prospero (©Nick Heavican)

The Metropolitan Opera announced their 2011-2012 season today at a press conference and now they have put the full 111-page brochure online with stunning photos highlighting the biggest events of the season. Click here to launch it!

Homecoming For Mariusz Kwiecień

Baritone Mariusz Kwiecień is currently in his hometown of Kraków, Poland for upcoming performances of Eugene Onegin in January 2011. In a current interview, he discusses living in New York (his favorite Polish restaurant in Brooklyn), trying to convince Peter Gelb to do Polish operas (like King Roger by Szymanowski), why he won't do crossover recordings (but loves techno and dance music), wanting to sing Verdi roles (Don Carlos is on the horizon) and politics. He also talks ifferences between him and his predecessors Teresa Żylis-Gara, Wiesław Ochman and Stefania Toczyska. Read the full article here.