Michael Beyer

German composer Richard Wagner wrote Parsifal, which is a three-act opera that tells the story of the title character's quest to save the Knights of the Holy Grail by returning the Holy Spear, healing King Amfortas, and carrying out the sacred ceremony of uncovering the Holy Grail.

Shakespeare’s play “Romeo and Juliet” has inspired generations of artists to adaptations like scarcely any other work. In his colorful, passionate music, the Russian composer Sergei Prokofiev brilliantly captured the clash of love and hatred, and the proximity of tenderness and violence. Inspired by Prokofiev’s vivid music and the timeless quality of Shakespeare’s tragedy, choreographer Christian Spuck and the Ballett Zürich narrate the most famous love story in world literature using strong images that are full of enthralling theatricality and touching emotion. Michail Jurowski, a true Prokofiev expert, is at the rostrum of the Philharmonia Zürich. Recorded live at Opernhaus Zürich June 2019.

Based on Alexander Pushkin’s dramatic verse novel "Eugen Onegin", the ballet tells the tragic love story of the world-weary aristocrat Onegin and the naïve country girl Tatiana. John Cranko’s Onegin holds a special place in the choreographic repertoire of the second half of the 20th century as one of the few original full-length ballets.

Kirill Serebrennikov is staging *Das Rheingold* as a global post-apocalyptic drama for the 2026 Easter Festival. The director is known for his uncompromising productions. In this new interpretation, he transforms the material into a symbol-laden global theatre piece. Kirill Petrenko will be the musical director of *Das Rheingold*.

As Christof Loy put it: Così fan tutte invites us to embrace the complexity of life and face the future with heads held high. In his staging of the version he abridged with Joana Mallwitz for the Salzburg Festival 2020 the focus is wholly on the figures and the subtle choreography of their emotional states — in a space that like a magnifying glass exposes the intricate mechanisms between the characters. In this way the production leads the protagonists and the audience to experience the ‘serene calm’ that can perhaps indeed cure our own ‘distempers’.

Live performance, Bayerische Staatsoper, 2011. The Tales of Hoffmann (French: LES CONTES D'HOFFMANN) is an opéra fantastique by Jacques Offenbach that combines three short stories by E.T.A. Hoffmann into a haunting whole: a melancholy poet reflects on three women he loved and lost in the past: a mechanical performing doll, a Venetian courtesan, and the consumptive daughter of a celebrated composer. One of the questions this opera poses for any director is how to link the 'tales' of Hoffmann's three lost loves together and knit them satisfactorily into the Prologue and Epilogue. In this production, Richard Jones solves the puzzle by turning it into an autobiographical journey which ends with a grand meet-up of all the characters Hoffmann has encountered: for once, Hoffmann is not presented as a rollicking kind of drunken story-spinner, but rather a sad-eyed, sobered-up depressive, who reaches for the bottle only because his disastrous love life has gone wrong yet again.

At the Salzburg Festival 2021, the musicAeterna Orchestra conducted by Teodor Currentzis performed the last symphonies of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart – No. 40 K. 550 and No. 41 K. 551 Jupiter. The two pinnacles of Mozart’s symphonic heritage are interconnected: the classic wrote symphonies No. 39–41 in one short period of just a few fruitful weeks in 1788. In the concert the two symphonies – the two sides of Mozart’s unfathomable genius – are joined by works that are close to them both in spirit and the time of creation: the orchestral Masonic Funeral Music in C minor, the recitative and aria of Donna Anna from the finale of the opera Don Giovanni and the chorus from the spiritual cantata Davide penitente created in 1785.

In the second part of this magnificent concert celebrating music from across Europe, Lukas Sternath, Martha Argerich, Bruce Liu and Hayato Sumino perform the finest piano concertos by Beethoven, Schumann, Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff.