A Gentle Creature

Met audiences were fascinated by Mariusz Treliński’s gripping, visionary production of Wagner’s epic opera. In the daunting title roles of the doomed lovers, Nina Stemme and Stuart Skelton are passionate, overwhelming, and heartbreaking as they battle every obstacle that separates them from their true destiny. René Pape is King Marke, betrayed not only by Isolde but by Tristan, the man he most trusts and loves like a son. With Ekaterina Gubanova as Isolde’s confidante Brangäne and Evgeny Nikitin as Kurwenal, Tristan’s loyal lieutenant. Simon Rattle conducts a surging, shimmering account of Wagner’s monumental score.

Roy, who lives abroad, recollects his youth. Soon he receives news about his old friend's death.

In Trelinski's timeless production he leads a superb, first-class young cast headed by Artur Ruzinski as Onegin and Kristīne Opolais as Tatyana. Mariusz Trelinski, Polish filmmaker and theater director, has created a series of dream-like, surrealist tableaux of great suggestive beauty.

A look at the 1990s generation of cynical and selfish young Varsovians who managed to achieve financial success. But at what cost?

Atanazy Bazakbal navigates a destructive love triangle between his innocent fiancée Zofia and the decadent Hela Bertz while seeking meaning through hedonism. As their personal lives unravel, a communist revolution sweeps through Poland, crushing the aristocracy's old world.

Valery Gergiev conducts Mariusz Trelinski’s thrilling new production of these rarely heard one-act operas. Anna Netrebko stars as the blind princess of the title in Tchaikovsky’s lyrical work, opposite Piotr Beczala as Vaudémont, the man who wins her love—and wakes her desire to be able to see. Nadja Michael and Mikhail Petrenko are Judith and Bluebeard in Bartók’s gripping psychological thriller about a woman discovering her new husband’s murderous past.

Music Director Yannick Nézet-Séguin conducts Verdi’s grand tale of ill-fated love, deadly vendettas, and family strife, with stellar soprano Lise Davidsen as the noble Leonora, one of the repertory’s most tormented—and thrilling—heroines. Director Mariusz Treliński delivers the company’s first new Forza in nearly 30 years, setting the scene in a contemporary world and making extensive use of the Met’s turntable to represent the unstoppable advance of destiny that drives the opera’s chain of calamitous events. The distinguished cast also features tenor Brian Jagde as Leonora’s forbidden beloved, Don Alvaro; baritone Igor Golovatenko as her vengeful brother, Don Carlo; bass-baritone Patrick Carfizzi as Fra Melitone; and bass Soloman Howard as both Leonora’s father and Padre Guardiano.

At Theater an der Wien Stanisław Moniuszko’s Polish national opera Halka is performed by a superb cast including Corinne Winters ('devotedly') , Piotr Beczała ('vocally outstanding') and Tomasz Konieczny ('his acting is piercing') (Der Standard). The Polish leading team, above all director Mariusz Treliński, puts the plot into a supercooled crime aesthetic. The ORF Radio Symphonie-Orchester Wien under the baton of Łukasz Borowicz plays with perceptible delight.

Young Renata hears voices. Since her childhood, she has been visited by a fiery angel with sublime radiance. Mad about him, gone in search of him since he abandoned her, she meets on her way the knight Ruprecht who, out of love for her, will try to tear her away from this carnal possession. From tavern to convent, between scenes of spiritualism or exorcism, collective hysteria or burlesque humor, nothing is lacking at L'Ange de feu.

Like Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Boris Godunov is capable of murder in pursuit of power. When Boris’s political opponents substitute a pretend descendant of the previous tsar, the so-called Pretender, to stage a coup d’état, Godunov, tormented by remorse, is certain that it is the reincarnation of his victim who, like an angel of vengeance, has come to take his life. Based on a play by Aleksandr Pushkin about the real-life Boris Godunov, the opera traces the life of the Russian Regent during the Time of Troubles in the late 16th century, from his coronation to his death. This sombre tragedy is about the cries of a nation, the scheming of those in power and the anguish of Boris himself. The music is richly modern, and filled with innovative harmonies based on Russian folk songs and traditional Russian Orthodox church music, and is considered the pinnacle of Russian opera.

Peter Grimes lives from fishing. Raw and recluse, he finds himself at odds with the local community who accuse him of brutality towards his young apprentices and blames him for the death of one of them. A few friends stand up for him - Ellen Orford, a widow whom he wants to marry, Balstrode a retired sea captain, and an apothecary Ned Keene - but Grimes remains a mysterious figure. What really happened to his missing apprentice, and was he involved?

‘You could have a blow job aria – begins with words, ends with humming.’ Using the story of a public scandal, the librettist Philip Hensher inspired the 23-year-old British composer Thomas Adès to portray the fall of the libertine and notorious socialite beauty the Duchess of Argyll, remembered in history as the Dirty Duchess. Powder Her Face is inspired by a sex scandal in 1963 that shocked the British upper class.

Spring 2020, Poland. 16 filmmakers create 14 short films about unexpected experience of isolation caused by pandemic.