Bavarian State Opera

The Bavarian State Opera (German: Bayerische Staatsoper) is an opera company based in Munich, Germany. Its orchestra is the Bavarian State Orchestra.

History

The opera company which was founded under Princess Henriette Adelaide of Savoy has been in existence since 1653, when Giovanni Battista Maccioni's L'arpa festante was performed in the court theatre. In 1753 the Residence Theatre (Cuvilliés Theatre) was opened as a major stage. While opera performances were also held in the Prinzregententheater (completed in 1901), the company's home base is the National Theatre Munich on Max-Joseph-Platz.

In 1875 the Munich Opera Festival took place for the first time which nowadays can be viewed as one of the most important opera festivals worldwide.

Sir Peter Jonas became the Staatsoper Staatsintendant (General Director) in 1993, the first British Intendant of any major German speaking opera house. In 2008, Nikolaus Bachler became General Director of the opera company. The current Generalmusikdirektor (GMD) of the company is Kirill Petrenko, since 2013. In October 2015, the company announced the extensions of the current respective contracts of Bachler and of Petrenko through August 2021. Petrenko is scheduled to work as a guest conductor with the company in the final year of his current contract, the 2020-2021 season.

Kirill Petrenko

Kirill Petrenko (born February 11, 1972, Omsk) is a Russian-Austrian conductor, Generalmusikdirektor (GMD) of Bavarian State Opera in Munich.

Petrenko is the son of a violinist father and musicologist mother. Petrenko is of Jewish descent. His father was born in Lviv (now in Ukraine). Petrenko studied piano as a youth, and made his public debut as a pianist at age 11. At age 18, he and his family emigrated to Austria, where his father played in the Vorarlberg Symphony. Petrenko formally studied music at the 'Vorarlberger Landeskonservatorium in Feldkirch, Vorarlberg, graduating with honours in piano studies. He continued his musical studies in Vienna at the University of Music and Performing Arts, Vienna, where his teachers included Uroš Lajovic. His other conducting teachers and mentors have included Myung-Whun Chung, Edward Downes, Péter Eötvös and Semyon Bychkov.

Petrenko made his conducting debut in opera in 1995 in Vorarlberg with a production of Benjamin Britten's Let's Make an Opera. He was a Kapellmeister at the Vienna Volksoper from 1997 to 1999. From 1999 to 2002, he was Generalmusikdirektor of the Südthüringisches Staatstheater, Das Meininger Theater (Meiningen, Germany), where his work included conducting the four operas of Richard Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen in 2001 on four consecutive days, his first professional conducting engagement with the operas of Wagner. More recently, he has conducted Wagner's complete Ring Cycle annually at the Bayreuth Festival in 2013, 2014, and 2015.

State Opera

State Opera may refer to :

Jonas Kaufmann

Jonas Kaufmann (born 10 July 1969) is a German operatic tenor. He is best known for his performances in spinto roles such as Don José in Carmen, Cavaradossi in Tosca, Maurizio in Adriana Lecouvreur, and the title role in Don Carlos. He has also sung leading tenor roles in the operas of Richard Wagner with success in Germany and abroad, most notably the Metropolitan Opera in New York. He is also an accomplished Lieder singer. In 2014 The New York Times described Kaufmann as "a box-office draw, and... the most important, versatile tenor of his generation."

Early life and education

Kaufmann was born in Munich. His father worked for an insurance company, and his mother was a kindergarten teacher. He had one older sister. He started studying piano when he was eight, and he sang in his elementary school choir. Although he studied for mathematics entrance exams, in the summer of 1989 he began his vocal training at the University of Music and Performing Arts Munich. While studying, he sang some small roles at the Bavarian State Opera. He graduated from school in 1994 achieving distinctions both in opera and concert performances.

Anja Harteros

Anja Harteros (born 23 July 1972) is a German operatic soprano. In 1999, she became the first German to win the Cardiff Singer of the World competition.

Biography

Harteros was born in Bergneustadt, North Rhine-Westphalia, to a Greek father and a German mother and has two siblings, Alexia and Georgios. As a child, she was encouraged by her parents to pursue classical music and singing. Eventually, her music teacher at the Wüllenweber-Gymnasium in Bergneustadt, August Wilhelm Welp, noticed her considerable talent and recommended that she be professionally educated in singing. At the age of 14 (in 1986), she started voice training under Astrid Huber-Aulmann in Gummersbach, concurrently with her schooling.

Her first performances were in music institute concerts and in a school production of The Marriage of Figaro in 1990, as the Countess. In 1992 she gave her first concert at the Kantonsschule Schwyz in Switzerland.

From 1990, her musical education was entrusted to the technically experienced conductor and repetiteur Wolfgang Kastorp at the Cologne Opera, who accompanied her in a series of concerts.