Performing: Leonardo García Alarcón, Georg Nigl, Anna Lucia Richter, Charlotte Hellekant, Grigory Shkarupa, Konstantin Wolff, Luciana Mancini, Julián Millán, Cécile Kempenaers, Terry Wey, Fabio Trümpy
Claudio Monteverdi’s Orfeo is considered to be the first opera and a masterpiece of European musical history. Certainly, this setting to music of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice is the earliest surviving Favola in musica, which at its première in 1607 apprehended for the first time instrumental music, song, dance and theatre as a unit.
For Sasha Waltz, Orfeo brings together different strands from previous creations, and connects soloists from her arrangements of contemporary pieces with actors from the world of ancient music. Her version of Henry Purcell’s baroque opera Dido & Aeneas signaled the start of a new chapter in her artistic work. She enhanced the media of musical theatre through the theatricality of dance and created a new genre for the opera, a fusion of dance, song and music: the choreographic opera. This new genre continued its development as Sasha Waltz worked on the compositions Medea (Dusapin, 2007), Roméo & Juliette (Berlioz, 2007), Passion (Dusapin, 2010) and Matsukaze (Hosokawa, 2011).
In Italian language with German and English surtitles.
Preface and introduction: 45 minutes before curtain time.