Axel Kober News
German music director and conductor
- Germany
- music director, conductor
Last update
2024-04-25
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2024-03-09 12:50:00
Parsifal, Deutsche Oper, 8 March 2024
[…] warning against resolution in ‘high-minded kitsch’, for redemption is an alien concept, one that never arises. The problem for me was not so much the grim framing, as the danger that by now the production had become its own ritual, in danger of succumbing to something not a million miles away from what it claimed to portray. Image: Bettina Stöß Donald Runnicles led a performance not so very different – as memory serves – from Axel Kober ten years ago, though probably still more secure. He and the splendid Orchestra of the Deutsche Oper (the chorus too) put not a foot wrong throughout. This was not the sort of performance one might characterise as a particular ‘reading’; Runnicles’s collegial brand of music-making is not about that. Instead, he drew on what is, by now, clearly deep knowledge and understanding of the score to present it as faithfully as he could, neither […]
2024-01-11 10:54:00
Jenůfa, Staatsoper Unter den Linden, 7 January 2024
Grandmother Buryja – Hanna Schwarz Kostelnička Buryja – Rosie Aldridge Jenůfa – Vida Miknevičiūtė Laca Klemeń – Stephan Rügamer Števa Buryja – Pavol Breslik Foreman – Grigory Shkarupa Jano – Victoria Randem Barena – Adriane Queiroz Mayor – David Oštrek Mayor’s Wife – Natalia Sckrycka Karolka – Maria Kokareva Herdswoman – Ekaterina Chayka-Rubinstein Auntie – Rebecka Wallroth Voices – Olga Vilenskaia, Ben BloomfieldDirector – Damiano MichielettoRevival director – Marcin ŁakomickiSet designs – Paolo FantinCostumes – Carlo TetiLighting – Alessandro CarlettiChoreography – Thomas Wilhelm Staatsopernchor Berlin (chorus director: Dani Juris)Staatskapelle BerlinAxel Kober (conductor)Images: Bernd Uhlig (from 2021 premiere, with different cast)Damiano Michieletto’s 2021 production of Jenůfa, now receiving its first revival, offers a relatively straightforward retelling of the story without prettifying or sentimentalising. Paolo Fantin’s set designs are stark: semi-transparent, enabling one to see, as in a small rural community, most of what is going on, whilst still maintaining some degree of secrecy. […]
2020-05-24 10:09:42
A Life On-Line: Der Freischütz and Arabella in Vienna, Orphée et Eurydice in Munich, and Nicky Spence in London
[…] of Rudolph Hartmann's 1965 production at Covent Garden conducted by John Pritchard, with Ingvar Wixell as Mandryka (the production lasted right until 1996!). And also remember seeing Josephine Barstow memorably singing the role at English National Opera in the 1980s. Since then, sightings have been rarer. In this 2012 Vienna performance, Emily Magee was a very striking Arabella with Tomasz Konwiczny as a very buttoned up yet rather sexy Mandryka, in a production by Axel Kober which moved the action to the 1920s or 1930s. I am not sure that this translation works, but the performances were very affecting nonetheless. And over in Munich, at the Bavarian State Opera, there were more unhappy musicians with Vesselina Kasarova's troubled composer Orphée in Nigel Lowery's production of Berlioz's 1859 version of Gluck's Orphée et Eurydice, conducted by Ivor Bolton. Musically this was terrific, with Rosemary Joshua as Eurydice, but Lowery's translating […]
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