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    Musical Performances to See in Europe This Winter

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    Concert halls and opera houses in Vienna, Berlin and beyond are offering fan favorites (“Die Fledermaus”) and surprises (an operatic “Animal Farm”).The winter opera and classical music season in Central and Eastern Europe balances holiday classics with rarities and even some fresh works. Opera houses and concert halls from Vienna to Berlin to Prague are presenting a varied program of old chestnuts and new discoveries. Here is a selection.Munich“Die Fledermaus,” Bayerische Staatsoper, through Jan. 10Barrie Kosky’s new production of Johann Strauss Jr.’s most popular operetta, “Die Fledermaus,” a New Year’s Eve favorite in much of Europe, is one of the most eagerly awaited events of the season here at the Bavarian State Opera. Mr. Kosky, an Australian director with a wide-ranging résumé — his recent successes include “Das Rheingold” in London and “Chicago” in Berlin — stages Strauss’s infectiously tuneful farce with energetic panache and a dash of camp. Vladimir Jurowski, the Munich company’s general music director, leads a spirited cast headed by the German star soprano Diana Damrau. The dynamic performances, carefully controlled chaos of Mr. Kosky’s staging, and a few unpredictable touches make this 150-year-old work seem fresher than ever. The Dec. 31 performance will also be streamed on the State Opera’s online platform. For the more traditionally inclined, the company is also bringing back August Everding’s sumptuous 1978 production of Mozart’s “Die Zauberflöte” (through Saturday).Barrie Kosky’s staging of “The Golden Cockerel,” performed in Lyon, France. The Komische Oper in Berlin, where the production will play this winter, has a long history with Slavic repertoire.Jean Louis FernandezBerlin“The Golden Cockerel,” Komische Oper Berlin in the Schiller Theater, Jan. 28-March 20A new production of Rimsky-Korsakov’s “The Golden Cockerel” at the Komische Oper Berlin is the first premiere to be led by the company’s newly minted general music director, the American James Gaffigan. This riotous and surreal take on the fairy-tale opera by Mr. Kosky, who ran the Komische as artistic director from 2012 to 2022, has also graced stages in Aix-en-Provence and Lyon, France, and Adelaide, Australia. In Berlin, it becomes the company’s latest foray into Slavic repertoire after inventive and gripping productions of Tchaikovsky’s “Eugene Onegin,” Prokofiev’s “The Fiery Angel” and Shostakovich’s “The Nose.”“Rusalka,” Staatsoper Unter den Linden, Feb. 4-22Antonin Dvorak’s 1901 opera “Rusalka” hovers on the edge of the standard repertoire. The lyrical and soaring aria “Song to the Moon” is better known than the rest of this dark and symbolically rich adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Little Mermaid.” The Hungarian filmmaker Kornel Mundruczo directs the first new production of “Rusalka” at the Berlin Staatsoper in over half a century. The British maestro Robin Ticciati, music director of the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin, conducts the lush and frequently melancholy score.Vienna“Animal Farm,” Wiener Staatsoper, Feb. 28-March 10The Russian composer Alexander Raskatov’s “Animal Farm” arrives at the Vienna State Opera in late February, in a production by the Italian director Damiano Michieletto. Reviewing the work’s world premiere in Amsterdam earlier this year, Shirley Apthorp, the Financial Times’s opera critic, praised Raskatov’s “violent, compelling sound-world, percussive and angular, full of unpleasant truths” in this operatic setting of Orwell’s famed allegory of the Russian Revolution. The British conductor Alexander Soddy leads the work’s Viennese premiere.Franz Welser-Möst and the Wiener Philharmoniker, Feb. 22-26In the first of five February concerts with the Vienna Philharmonic, Franz Welser-Möst, the former general music director of the Wiener Staatsoper and longtime leader of the Cleveland Orchestra, tackles Mahler’s towering and elegiac Ninth Symphony at the Wiener Konzerthaus. On subsequent programs, performed in the Musikverein, the Austrian maestro leads the Viennese in works by Ravel, Hindemith, Schoenberg, Berg, Bruckner and Richard Strauss.West Side Story, Volksoper Wien, Jan. 27-March 24In late January, music by Leonard Bernstein will resound through Vienna’s opera houses. Shortly after the American director Lydia Steier unveils her “Candide” at the MusikTheater an der Wien, a new “West Side Story” arrives at the Volksoper, the city’s traditional operetta and musical stage on the other side of town. (The house’s other productions this season include “Die Fledermaus” and “Aristocats.”) For the director Lotte de Beer’s rendition of the quintessential American boy-meets-girl musical, performed in a mix of German and English, the Puerto Rico-born, New York-raised choreographer Bryan Arias updates Jerome Robbins’s classic dance moves.“Katya Kabanova” at the National Theater in Prague, featuring, from left, Jaroslav Brezina, Eva Urbanova and Alzbeta Polackova. Zdeněk SokolPrague“Katya Kabanova,” The National Theater, March 22-27Leos Janacek’s searing 1921 opera about the emotional unraveling of an adulterous wife in 19th-century Russia returns to the National Theater in Prague in a production by the provocative Catalan director Calixto Bieito, who is famous for his unorthodox interpretations of classic operas. Jaroslav Kyzlink, a Janacek specialist, leads the psychologically raw score and Alzbeta Polackova, a much-loved soprano with the company, tackles the vocally and emotionally punishing title role.Bratislava, Slovakia“Hubicka (The Kiss),” Slovak National Theater, March 1-June 8In honor of the 200th anniversary of the great Czech composer Bedrich Smetana’s birth, the Slovak National Theater presents his 1876 opera “The Kiss.” Once among the composer’s most popular works, “The Kiss” has long been eclipsed by Smetana’s earlier comic opera “The Bartered Bride,” and is remembered mostly for its lilting lullaby. With Andrea Hlinkova’s new production, the Slovak National Theater, which, coincidentally, was opened in 1920 with a performance of “The Kiss,” hopes to change that.Budapest“Bartok DanceTriptych,” Hungarian State Opera, Feb. 1-24Three works by Hungary’s great modernist composer Bela Bartok comprise this new ballet, choreographed by a trio of creatives. Laszlo Velekei, the director of the Ballet Company of Gyor, in northwestern Hungary, tackles “The Wooden Prince,” a pantomime ballet (a work half-danced, half-mimed) that premiered at the Hungarian State Opera House in 1917. Bartok’s second (and last) ballet, “The Miraculous Mandarin,” caused a scandal when it was first performed in 1926 in Cologne, Germany, because it depicted a girl forced into prostitution in a seething modern metropolis. In her production, Marianna Venekei, a longtime member of the Hungarian State Opera, explores the psychology of the work’s motley crew of city dwellers. Rounding out the program is the “Dance Suite” (1923), originally a concert piece and here choreographed by Kristof Varnagy, whose varied résumé includes projects with classical ballet companies, contemporary dance troupes and even Cirque du Soleil. Writing about the short movements that make up the “Dance Suite,” Bartok said his aim was to “present some idealized peasant music.” More

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      Review: Braxton’s ‘Trillium’ Gets the Attention It Needs

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      Anthony Braxton’s “Trillium X,” part of a sweeping cycle of operas that began in the 1980s, finally premiered in Prague.Anyone bold enough to take command of a pirate ship should also be prepared for strife. Cannon battles? Frustrated crew members? All part of the job.Yet Helena, the captain of the Dragon Lily BX4, must face more than that in the first act of Anthony Braxton’s opera “Trillium X,” which was completed in 2014 but premiered on Tuesday at the DOX Center for Contemporary Art in Prague.After scheming like a titan of industry, and after sending scores of enemies to their watery graves — even after genocidally pledging to foster “the kind of mess that historians will love forever” — Helena still has to deal with those who doubt her ruthlessness. When the pirate discovers some young stowaways aboard her vessel, she learns that they have studied her violent exploits at college. They’re not impressed, calling her “overrated” to her face.It’s one of the best jokes in this opera. And it was hardly the only punchline in the four-act, over-five-hour evening, which had young audience members laughing out loud in the aisles of the museum’s joyously oversold hall.In the role of Helena, the soprano Eva Esterkova deployed a secure vibrato — including in piercing, high-tessitura phrases — that channeled the character’s unflappability. On the whole, the performance came off as a significant milestone in Braxton’s opera career, thanks to some revelatory work by a cast of 12, the Prague Music Performance Orchestra and the conductor Roland Dahinden, a longtime Braxton collaborator. Officially a concert performance, the show had enough video projections and lighting design choices to foment some stage magic, too.Roland Dahinden led the Prague Music Performance Orchestra in the performance.Marek BoudaThis “Trillium X” also served as a reminder of the broader “Trillium” series, an ambitious cycle that Braxton has said will eventually include 36 discrete acts — all of which can then be freely recombined from one production to the next. They have been produced by his own Tri-Centric Foundation on shoestring budgets in the United States. But this performance in Prague demonstrated just how much American opera companies, and audiences, are missing in neglecting this project.You may catch a scrappy outfit like Experiments in Opera delving into the “Trillium” operas at a black box theater, like that company did earlier this year. Braxton’s foundation produced a semi-staged version of “Trillium J” in 2014: a vivacious performance that was released as a Blu-ray, alongside a studio-recorded version. But, sadly, major classical music presenters have shown little interest in this work.That might have something to do with a broadly held perception that Braxton is too abstruse for the mainstream. Since the 1960s, he has long been reputed for the complex, overlapping nature of his many creative guises: as an experimental composer, as a student of jazz and an improviser, and, starting in the 1980s, a creator of music dramas.In the “Trillium” operas, the music seems to always be in flux, moving from pleasingly sour drone states to singsong marches and riotous blasts of orchestral pandemonium. Nor do the plots stay put. As in other “Trillium” works, each act of “Trillium X” featured the same singers, and the same character names, but placed them in entirely different situations. Braxton has expressed affection for the operatic cycles of Wagner and Stockhausen, but with no linear narrative, this is far from the “Ring.”Alongside all the complexity — and here is the too-often undersold part — this stuff is a lot of fun, too. In the semi-staging of “Trillium J,” which is also available on Vimeo, you can see how much the soprano Kamala Sankaram enjoys playing (in her character’s own words) a “helpless maiden who happens to own 400 nuclear weapons stockpile containers — not to mention the chemical gas warfare options.”Featuring the soprano Kamala Sankaram.After the first act on the high seas in “Trillium X,” the second act begins with singers hiding out from robots that have taken away humans’ voting rights, and their ability to get credit. Act III, titled “The Three Sisters,” depicts the joint wedding of a trio of celebrity bank robbers. (Esterkova was once again a key presence during that section’s gun-toting delirium.) The fourth act begins in the White House’s war room, before moving to the site of a Roman orgy.Dahinden’s orchestra responded to the score’s tumultuous moments with precise intonation and enviable balance. But the violins also sound sympathetic and sweet in the second act, as human characters lamented the way they’d allowed robots to slowly take over the world.Video projections (Barbora Jagrova and Tobuke are credited for the lighting and visual designs) that show robots patrolling a doomed, lamp-lit cityscape were both comic and chilling. When one live human singer proposed a détente with the robots, he was greeted with pretaped sounds from the robots, which declared on repeat: “YOU. ARE. WRONG.”Those robot chants, as well as cannon blasts and nuclear explosions in other acts, were delivered by speakers. Singers, too, were amplified. But the sound mix didn’t feel artificial; each portion of the orchestra was audible at all times. In the second act, brass exclamations contributed to an interpolated Braxton piano composition performed by pianist Hildegard Kleeb. (Since Braxton has written that “all compositions in my music system can be executed at the same time/moment,” the insertion of this material — like Composition No. 30 for piano solo, or Composition No. 257, which included the brasses — was fair play.)Braxton’s own Tri-Centric Orchestra deserves more opportunities to play this music in American halls. But the Prague Music Performance Orchestra proved that it can also pull off a credible “Trillium” show; thankfully, the program for Tuesday’s concert advertised the ensemble’s plans to record “Trillium X” and present the live premiere of “Trillium L” in 2025.So this language is not too complex to be learned. This orchestra’s founder and director, Jan Bartos, said in an email that the concert had come together with a week of rehearsal and a budget of about $100,000.More performances of this music, and at a similarly high level, should be possible. A question, then, now hangs over the United States: Who will take on “Trillium” next?Trillium XPerformed on Tuesday at the DOX Center for Contemporary Art in Prague. More

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      A Pianist Finds Inspiration to Write Again

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      Evgeny Kissin, who has made a career of performing, was surprised to find himself drawn once more to composing.For the pianist Evgeny Kissin, it was a love story that provided the inspiration to write his own music again. After being reunited with a childhood friend — now his wife — he woke up in the middle of the night and jotted down a “Meditation” that would become the first of his Four Piano Pieces Op. 1.Mr. Kissin is best known as a soloist who began his career as a child prodigy. By age 12 he had performed both Chopin concertos in his native Russia and by 19 he had made headlines with the Berlin Philharmonic and the New York Philharmonic.He remains one of today’s most highly regarded pianists for the intensity and sensitivity of his interpretations. He also began writing music as a child, as soon as he had learned notation, but stopped at about age 14, not resuming until just shy of a decade ago.As he approaches his 50th birthday in October, Mr. Kissin maintains an insatiable intellectual curiosity. His solo recital Saturday at the Salzburg Festival features works by Chopin, Gershwin, Alban Berg and Tichon N. Chrennikow (as a child, Mr. Kissin performed works, including ones he had written himself, for this Russian composer).The fall brings a busy concert schedule, in cities as varied as Jerusalem, Seoul and Kaohsiung, Taiwan. At the same time, he is steadily growing his catalog, most recently with “Thanatopsis,” a setting of the William Cullen Bryant poem, for female voice and piano.“The very fact that I started composing again came to me as a surprise,” he admitted in a video call earlier this month from his home in Prague, citing a “hidden potential” that was awakened by his romance with that childhood friend, Karina Arzumanova, whom he married in 2017.In his 2017 autobiography “Memoirs and Reflections,” Mr. Kissin wrote that music “stopped sounding in my head” as his concert career gained momentum. Since 2012, ideas have been flowing back, and he continues in a noncompetitive manner: “Let us see what comes of it,” he wrote, “and how audiences will respond to my music.”Mr. Kissin’s music displays a range of extreme emotions.Milan Bures for The New York TimesThe works that have been published so far reveal the sharp intellect and natural artistry that also characterize his performances. The last of the Four Piano Pieces, the Toccata, revolves around a jazzy, Gershwin-like motif, at first distorted by harsh dissonance, while running across the keyboard with virtuosic arpeggiated textures.His one-movement cello sonata, meanwhile, is lyrical and introspective, with a theme that sounds as if it is based on a 12-tone system but in fact is derived from only eight notes.Mr. Kissin has received the support of Arvo Part, one of the most widely performed contemporary composers, and leading musicians. His String Quartet was recorded by the Kopelman Quartet in 2016, and the cello piece has been championed by the international soloists Steven Isserlis, David Geringas and Renaud Capuçon.In a phone interview from London, Mr. Isserlis noted the range of styles that Mr. Kissin has managed to express in only a handful of works. “He’s such an intense person, and musician,” he said. “He has a very serious view of the world, although he’s not without humor.”Mr. Isserlis placed the “extreme emotions” of Mr. Kissin’s music in a line of pianist-composers ranging from Schuman to Rachmaninoff but also noted a specifically Russian-Jewish tradition. “There’s a darkness,” he said. “But there’s also a love of beauty. It has its roots in the past, like all good music.”Mr. Kissin, who in 2013 became an Israeli citizen, qualified any strict categorization by saying that he identifies with “a small minority of the Russian population, namely, the liberal Russian intelligentsia — a significant part of which consists of Jews like me.”For many years he has recited Yiddish poetry onstage and is himself a poet and writer, with work published in the Yiddish edition of The Forward and in a 2019 book, “A Yiddisher Sheygets.”Mr. Kissin at his home in Prague.Milan Bures for The New York TimesThe pianist is passionate about raising awareness toward the historic and aesthetic value of Yiddish, a Germanic language spoken by Ashkenazi Jews since the ninth century.Yiddish, Mr. Kissin writes in his memoir, belongs “to the highest achievements of world culture.” He notes its “rich and expressive” quality and an “inner strength” that “is capable of conveying the subtlest thoughts and feelings.”He and the writer and editor Boris Sandler joined forces for the Yiddish-language musical “The Bird Alef From the Old Gramophone,” which was performed two years ago in Birobidzhan, the center of the Jewish Autonomous Region in Eastern Russia. Although Jews account for less than 2 percent of the region’s population, Yiddish is still the official language.The musical’s creators hope to have it staged in Moscow next summer to mark the 70th anniversary of the Night of the Murdered Poets, when 13 Jewish intellectuals — including Yiddish poets — were executed by firing squads under orders from Stalin.Mr. Kissin is also working on a vocal cycle for baritone and piano based on the work of the Russian poet Alexander Blok. Ideas for the work emerged as early as 1986, he said, but he began writing down the music only in recent years.Mr. Kissin again emphasized that “it’s a matter of inspiration. And of course also of time. I only compose sporadically because it requires blocks of concentration,” he said, “which my main occupation as concert pianist allows very seldom.”Asked what repertoire he would like to explore in coming years, he rattled off a list of solo and chamber work with encyclopedic precision: the solo works of Bach and Shostakovich, which he has never played in public; Brahms’s Third Violin Sonata, one of his “favorite pieces of music ever written,” which he has played only once; Haydn, Mozart, Ravel, Scriabin.But he will also return to Rachmaninoff’s Third Piano Concerto, which he has not played since 1996, to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the composer’s birth in 2023. Also that year, he plans to take on the Piano Concerto of Rimsky-Korsakov.Despite his renewed activities as a composer, Mr. Kissin remains humble: “I would never dare to compose myself knowing that I would never be able to write something approaching the level of the great music already written.“Playing music,” he continued, “is how I can express myself best.” More