Intermezzo

Zurich Opera 2014 - 2015 season

The new mission of opera companies is to fox their customers with unreadable and/or incomplete season announcements. Or so it seems. After Barcelona's irritating Twitter drip-feed comes Zurich's online magazine - spread over 246 (!) pages,  illegible on any screen smaller than laptop size, and impossible to auto-translate for anyone who doesn't read German. I can only hope they get their act together and stick it all up on the website soon.

Ticciati walks out of opera

Robin Ticciati has had enough of Zurich Opera's controversial new Don Giovanni, pictured above. He has handed his baton in after just two performances, leaving music director Fabio Luisi to conduct the remainder of the long run.

Ticciati himself has not explained his reasons. The opera house say that he didn't like Sebastian Baumgarten's production. The director was heavily booed on opening night - as was Ticciati's conducting of Zurich's La Scintilla period orchestra.

Now, any conductor is entitled to his opinions about a staging, and Ticciati certainly has the weight of public opinion behind him if he doesn't care for this one. But then many conductors are jurassic creatures who take exception to any number of modern productions. The usual practice is to accept it as a job hazard and soldier on with gritted teeth like a good team player to support singers and other staff who in all probability share the sentiments.

But perhaps this particular production is so intolerable that Ticciati is genuinely unable to conduct it. If that's the case, his timing is odd. Baumgarten has been directing opera for nearly twenty years, and always provocatively. So an aesthetically-sensitive conductor should have identified the potential for a problem right at the start - let alone before six weeks of rehearsal and two public performances were up. Intendant Andreas Homoki claims surprise at the decision, saying Ticciati was "sometimes sceptical, but always constructive" during rehearsals.

Could there be more to Ticciati's withdrawal than meets the eye?

In an interesting parallel, Thomas Hengelbrock failed to return to Bayreuth's widely-reviled current Tannhäuser - another Baumgarten production - after his 2011 debut, though he did at least make it through one full run. 

Zurich Opera 2013 - 2014 season revealed

With the new team of Intendant Andreas Homoki and music director Fabio Luisi halfway through their first season, Zurich's programming is showing an increasingly adventurous touch.

The big news for 2013-14 is that Calixto Bieito has been picked to tackle the mammoth Die Soldaten. There will be blood. Homoki and Luisi join forces in a new Fidelio, and Cecilia Bartoli stars in a new Christof Loy Alcina.

Star singers are otherwise thin on the ground, though there is a Salome with Nina Stemme and Evgeny Nikitin and Don Carlo with Rene Pape, Fabio Sartori and Marina Poplavskaya. Fans of the ageless Edita Gruberova can catch her twice -  in La Straniera and Roberto Devereux.

Here's the full list of new productions:

Die Soldaten - d.Calixto Bieito, c.Marc Albrecht

Faust - d.Jan Philipp Gloger, c.Patrick Lange

Fidelio - d.Andreas Homoki, c.Fabio Luisi

Alcina - d.Christof Loy, c.Giovanni Antonini - Cecilia Bartoli

Aida - d.Tatjana Gurbaca, c.Fabio Luisi

Pique Dame - d.Robert Carsen, c.Jiri Belohlavek

Il Ritorno d'Ulisse - d.Willy Decker, c.Ivor Bolton

La Fanciulla del West - d.Barrie Kosky, c.Marco Armiliato

Details are not yet up on the website, but the season brochure can be viewed online.

Swiss Welsh Dutchman in London

Der fliegende Holländer - Oper Zürich - Royal Festival Hall, 15 December 2012

As they've done a few times before, Zurich Opera interrupted their home schedule to bring a concert version of a current show to the Royal Festival Hall - orchestra, singers and all.

This time round, it was their new production of Der fliegende Holländer.  Both London houses have tackled it recently. Neither managed, with all the costumes, curtains and furnishing items at their disposal, anything nearly as thrilling as Zurich gave us with a bare stage  - and a few top-class singers.

Kaufmann's cancellations cost dear

Zurich Opera's administrative director Otto Grosskopf has revealed that Jonas Kaufmann's illness earlier in the season cost the house 300,000 Swiss francs (around £200,000), leaving it barely scraping even over the year as a whole. 

Kaufmann cancelled two sold-out gala concerts in May at short notice, forcing then-Intendant Alexander Pereira to scramble for replacements. If he hadn't been able to persuade Edita Gruberova and Leo Nucci to step in, then the overall loss would have been an even bigger 800,000 francs (over half a million pounds) - a significant dent in the 134 million franc annual budget.

"This shows just how much we depend on stars," Grosskopf said.

Bartoli in Otello?

It's the Rossini version of course, from Zurich Opera, and it's being streamed on Medici.tv tomorrow (Thursday) at 6pm. Free!