John Mark Ainsley is an English lyric tenor. Known for his supple voice, Ainsley is particularly admired for his interpretations of baroque music and the works of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. In the course of his career, he has gravitated towards 20th-century music, singing in operas by Henze, Janáček, and Britten.
Hans Werner Henze was a German composer. His large oeuvre of works is extremely varied in style, having been influenced by serialism, atonality, Stravinsky, Italian music, Arabic music and jazz, as well as traditional schools of German composition. In particular, his stage works reflect "his consistent cultivation of music for the theatre throughout his life".
The English Cat is an opera in two acts by Hans Werner Henze to an English libretto by Edward Bond, based on Les peines de coeur d'une chatte anglaise by Honoré de Balzac. The opera was first performed in a German translation by the Stuttgart Opera at the Schlosstheater Schwetzingen at the Schwetzingen Festival on 2 June 1983. The French premiere was at the Opéra-Comique, Paris in 1984. The first performance using the original English text was at Santa Fe on 13 July 1985. The UK premiere was at the Leith Theatre, Edinburgh, on 19 August 1987. A revised version was performed at Montepulciano in 1990 and this was given in London in 1991.
Venus und Adonis is a one-act opera by Hans Werner Henze with a German libretto by Hans-Ulrich Treichel, after the poem by William Shakespeare. The work uses singers and dancers.
Markus Stenz is a German conductor. He studied at the Hochschule für Musik Köln with Volker Wangenhein and at Tanglewood with Leonard Bernstein and Seiji Ozawa.
Phaedra is a 'concert opera' in two acts by Hans Werner Henze. Its first performance was given at the Berlin State Opera on 6 September 2007. The work is a co-commission and co-production with the Berliner Festspiele, Théâtre de la Monnaie, Brussels, Alte Oper Frankfurt and the Vienna Festival.
Literaturoper, a term coined by the German music critic Edgar Istel, describes a genre of opera that emerged during the late 19th century. When an existing play for the legitimate theatre is set to music without major changes and without the intervention of a librettist, a “Literaturoper” is the result. Although the term is German, it can be applied to any kind of opera, irrespective of style or language.
Loren Driscoll was an American tenor who had an active international career from the 1950s through the mid-1980s. Driscoll was particularly noted for his performances in contemporary operas and sang in many world premieres.
Dieter Dorn is a German theatre director, also for the opera, the manager of the Münchner Kammerspiele from 1983 to 2001 and now manager of the Bavarian Staatsschauspiel.
Wolfgang Schöne is a German bass-baritone in opera and concert.
Axel Köhler is a German countertenor and opera director. In 1994, he won the Handel Prize. Since 2009, he has been Artistic Director of the Halle Opera House.
Detlev Glanert is a German opera composer, who has also composed numerous works for chamber and full orchestra, including three symphonies.
Gerd Kühr, also Gerd Kuhr, is an Austrian conductor, composer of classical music and academic teacher. He is known for operas, such as Stallerhof on a libretto by the author of the play, Franz Xaver Kroetz, and film music including Schlöndorff's Eine Liebe von Swann.
Sandeep Bhagwati is a German composer of western classical music and an academic teacher.
Andrew Watts is a British classical countertenor.
Claudia Barainsky is a German operatic soprano. She has performed internationally, and won awards for her roles in contemporary operas such as Bernd Alois Zimmermann's Die Soldaten and Aribert Reimann's Medea.
Ein Landarzt is a one-act chamber opera composed by Hans Werner Henze. The libretto was written by Henze and is closely based on Kafka's 1917 short story "Ein Landarzt". The work was originally composed as a radio opera and was premiered on 19 November 1951 in a broadcast by Nordwestdeutscher Rundfunk. Henze subsequently revised the work in 1964 both as a monodrama for baritone and chamber orchestra and as a one-act staged opera. The stage version was premiered by the Oper Frankfurt on 30 November 1965.
Laura Aikin is an American operatic coloratura soprano. She is noted for her portrayal of the title character in Lulu, which has received very positive reviews in the press. She has also appeared as Mozart's Queen of the Night, Zerbinetta by Richard Strauss and in contemporary opera at international opera houses and festivals.
Claus Guth is a German theatre director, focused on opera. He has directed operas at major houses and festivals, including world premieres such as works of the Munich Biennale, and Berio's Cronaca del luogo at the Salzburg Festival in 1999. Guth is particularly known for his opera productions of the works of Richard Wagner and Richard Strauss. He has received two Faust awards, for Daphne by Richard Strauss in 2010, and for Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande, both at the Oper Frankfurt.
