Fabio Luisi Launches 2013-14 Season at Zurich Opera with FIDELIO, AIDA and More

Fabio Luisi, Grammy and ECHO Klassik Award-winner and Principal Conductor of the Metropolitan Opera, launches his second season as General Music Director of the Zurich Opera with new productions of Beethoven's Fidelio and Verdi's Aida. Luisi also leads three revivals in the 2013-14 season: Bellini's La straniera, Offenbach's Les contes d'Hoffmann, and Verdi's Don Carlo, and conducts Philharmonia Zurich's "Big Five" concert series, revealing why he is as venerated in the concert hall as he is in the opera house. The coming season sees Luisi in collaboration with directorAndreas Homoki - the Zurich Opera General Manager - in Fidelio and German director Tatjana Gürbaca in Aida, as well as a roster of powerhouse performers including René Pape, Anja Kampe, Brandon Jovanovich, and Latonia Moore.

Luisi's second season at the helm in Zurich features a program of ten premieres and more than 25 operas. Since last season's "triumphant" opening production of Jenufa (Seen and Heard International), Luisi continues to invite new directors and ideas to create his vision of the new Zurich Opera: "We are starting a new era, a new age, a new time."

Luisi's first new production of the year takes place in December when he leads eight performances of Beethoven's sole opera Fidelio (Dec 8-Jan 5). This will be the conductor's first Zurich collaboration with General Manager Andreas Homoki, whose direction helped win the French Theater Critics Award for Best Opera for Die Frau ohne Schatten. Like Luisi, Homoki began his tenure at the Zurich Opera last year, and the duo's artistic collaboration produces a fresh vision in Fidelio. As Intermezzo observes: "With the new team of Intendant Andreas Homoki and music director Fabio Luisi... Zurich's programming is showing an increasingly adventurous touch."

German soprano Anja Kampe brings her celebrated portrayal of the opera's heroine Leonore, after whom the opera was originally named, to Zurich for her house debut. In previous productions of Fidelio, Opera Magazine called Kampe "the Leonore of one's dreams," and the L.A. Times concluded that, "with calm authority, Kampe expresses the impossible." Brandon Jovanovich, a "world-class singer-actor" (Sunday Times) and winner of the Richard Tucker Award, stars opposite Kampe, bringing his "bright, lustrous tenor" (San Francisco Chronicle) to his portrayal of Florestan.

Luisi subsequently premieres a new production of Verdi's Aida, taking the podium for all ten performances (Mar 2-Apr 1). This collaboration with young German director Tatjana Gürbaca promises to live up to the promise of the team's "consistently exciting" production of Verdi's Rigoletto last spring (Basellandschaftliche Zeitung). Anthony Tommasini also praised Luisi's treatment of Verdi in the New York Times for a 2011 staging of Rigoletto:

"Mr. Luisi is a technically exacting, no-nonsense conductor. Yet for all the freshness in this Rigoletto there was no sense that an imposing maestro had arrived to clear away accumulated interpretive clutter from a Verdi staple and deliver a newly fit and trim performance. Mr. Luisi is steeped in the Verdi style. There was vigor and clarity in the music making, starting from the grave orchestral prologue...Mr. Luisi also allowed ample breathing room for soaring melodic lines and supplely rendered the Verdi trademark oom-pah-pah accompaniments."

American soprano Latonia Moore has sung Aida at Covent Garden, Hamburg State Opera, and the Met; the New York Times praised her as "richly talented" and called her performance as Verdi's heroine "radiant" and "plush." Latvian tenor Aleksandrs Antonenko co-stars as Radames. Antonenko, a nominee for the first International Opera Award for Best Male Singer, brings his "winning confidence and ease" (New York Times) to the role.

Luisi will also conduct three of the eighteen revivals at Zurich this season, including the production of Bellini's La straniera (Sept 28-Oct 22) from bold German director Christof Loy. Opera News called Loy's recent staging of Janacek's Jenufa "breathtaking" and "striking." Edita Gruberová, whose "legion of followers and admirers seem to enter ecstasy at her mere presence" (Seen and Heard International), stars in all six performances.

The revival of Offenbach's Les contes d'Hoffmann (Mar 21-Apr 2) by veteran German director Grischa Asagaroff features young American tenor Bryan Hymel, the Metropolitan Opera's Beverly Sills Artist of 2013. The Philadelphia Inquirer pronounced Hymel's high notes "easily among the best in the business."

Luisi's revival of Verdi's Don Carlo (Feb 15-March 1) features a cast of luminaries anchored by René Pape, the "king of lyric basses" (Wall Street Journal). In a review of a 2006 staging, Anthony Tommasini in the New York Times suggested that Pape "so dominated the performance that Verdi'sDon Carlo might have been renamed The Tragedy of King Philip." Russian soprano Marina Poplavskaya stars as Elisabeth, the role that "suit[s] Poplavskaya best" (Guardian).

This production of Don Carlo serves as the vehicle for Luisi's return to Milan's Teatro alla Scala, where his debut of Massenet's Manon last season met with high praise: Giornale della Musica pronounced Luisi "the real star" of the production.

Luisi continues his focus on orchestral music in Zurich in 2013-14, leading four of six orchestral programs with the newly renamed Philharmonia Zurich in collaboration with Zurich's Artist-in-Residence, French pianist Lise de la Salle. Called "The Big Five," the concerts will provide insight into the 19th and 20th-century symphonic repertoire through key masterworks by Berlioz, Rachmaninoff, Tchaikovsky, Mahler, Hartmann, and Beethoven. For the first program Luisi will conduct Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique and unite with de la Salle for Rachmaninoff's Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini(Sep 29). The pair will then perform Rachmaninoff's Second Piano Concerto, which Luisi couples with Tchaikovsky's seminal Symphony No. 6, "Pathétique" on December 22. He also conducts Mahler's First Symphony alongside Hartmann's Concerto funèbre with violinist Hanna Weinmeister(March 16), and finishes his season with Rachmaninoff's First Piano Concerto, again featuring de la Salle as the soloist, and Beethoven's exuberant Mass in C (July 6). Luisi's "brunch concert," Fabio Luisi and Friends, which features the conductor himself at the piano, rounds out the season (March 2).

A list of the conductor's Zurich events follows, and more information is available at the web sites provided below.

Fabio Luisi: Zurich engagements, 2013-14:

Sep 28; Oct 2, 6, 13, 17 & 22

Zurich Opera

Bellini: La straniera

Sep 29

Philharmonia Zurich

Einem: Capriccio, Op. 2

Rachmaninoff: Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, Op. 43 (with Lise de la Salle, piano)

Berlioz: Symphonie fantastique

Dec 8, 12, 15, 18, 20, 29; Jan 1 & 5

Zurich Opera

Beethoven: Fidelio (new production)

Dec 22

Philharmonia Zurich

Rachmaninoff: Piano Concerto No. 2 (with Lise de la Salle, piano)

Tchaikovsky: Symphony No. 6 ("Pathétique")

Feb 15, 21, 23, 26; March 1

Zurich Opera

Verdi: Don Carlo

March 2

Brunch Concert: Fabio Luisi and Friends

Schmidt: Clarinet Quintet (Fabio Luisi, piano)

March 2, 6, 9, 13, 16, 19, 22, 26, 29; April 1

Zurich Opera

Verdi: Aida (new production)

March 16

Philharmonia Zurich

Hartmann: Concerto funèbre (with Hanna Weinmeister, violin)

Mahler: Symphony No. 1

March 21, 25, 28, 30; April 2

Zurich Opera

Offenbach: Les contes d'Hoffmann

July 6

Philharmonia Zurich

Rachmaninoff: Piano Concerto No. 1 (with Lise de la Salle, piano)

Beethoven: Mass in C, Op. 86