Jerusalem Lyric Opera

30th Sep 2024

V.Bellini I Capuleti e I Montecchi

Did you know that Bellini`s opera I Capuleti e I Montecchi is based on a play by the outstanding 16th century Italian writer Matteo Bandello? The plot of two unhappy lovers was known in Italy during the Renaissance. We find the first literary description in a short story by Masuccio dated 1476. Then the story described by the outstanding poet Luigi da Porto in 1524 gains great popularity in Italy, and already in 1532 a play by Matteo Bandello appears, describing the story of two lovers, with many details which we then find in Shakespeare.
In the opera, Romeo and Giulietta already know each other and are in love with each other. But they cannot be together because of the political feud of their families, who are fighting for power in the city. The Capuleti and Monttecchi are embroiled in a real-life historical struggle in Italy between the Guelphs (supporters of the pope) and the Ghibellines (supporters of the Holy Roman Emperor). This approach of the composer also affected the title of the opera, which bears not the names of lovers, but only the names of warring clans.
Despite the political background, Bellini created a stunningly beautiful opera about love, devotion and fidelity.
As an illustration, Salvador Dali`s painting Romeo and Juliet

2nd Sep 2024

Operetta`s Concerts

The Lyric Opera Festival continues its exploration of Emmerich Kalman, Jacques Offenbach, and Johann Strauss. Highlights from "Die Lustige Witwe", "Die Fledermaus`" "La Perichole", "Die Zirkusprinzessin" and others will be played in the current season. Kalmam`s great hit, "Die Zirkusprinzessin", has been announced with two semi-staged performances conducted by Sofia Mazar and supervised by Yulia Fein as stage director.

By the way: the original cast from 1926 included legendary Hubert Marischka who was also director of Stadttheater Wien, Missi Zwerenz, Elsie Altmann, and Fritz Steiner.

7th Jun 2024

G.F.Handel Giulio Cesare in Egitto

Cleopatra dreams of becoming queen of Egypt, but she has to share power with her brother Ptolemy. In hopes of gaining the throne, she is forced to join her enemies and seduce Caesar, who conquered Egypt. Suddenly this feeling develops into love, which can exist despite political intrigues and wars.
Giulio Cesare in Egitto (Julius Caesar in Egypt), which was first performed in 1724 in London at the King´s Theatre was the most often performed of all of his operas during his lifetime, it was his most successful opera after his death.
The Baroque concept is based on ecstatic anticipation and the discovery of a miracle, the dynamics of contrasting comparisons, the sublime and the earthly, the tragic and the comic; it represented musical drama as a multifaceted, dramatically polyphonic, luxuriously staged performance, replete with stage effects, machinery, costumes, scenery, marked by concert brightness and vocal virtuosity letters. The strengthening of the classicist tendency during the first half of the eighteenth century, based on an attempt to establish a cult of reason requiring “clarity, dignity, and purity,” led to the clarification of the style and composition of the libretto, the crystallization of normative, orderly poetics, modeling musical drama as a mathematically calculated structure. Infinite time was presented in the form of a symmetrically organized closed space. The pathos of Enlightenment classicism was in correcting “rough” nature, including human nature, carried out through the purification of passions. Hence the inevitability of a happy ending, in essence - the achievement of harmony, designed to become an individual experience of the “central” viewer in position - the absolute, which meant an enlightened monarch.
Handel shows the Roman dictator Caesar as an enlightened monarch. He instructs his opponent, the Egyptian tyrant Tolomeo, about how he should deal with his opponents: he reconciles himself with the widow and son of his enemy Pompeo, murdered by Tolomeo, he is generous, decisive, and diplomatic, contemplative, and receptive to art and nature.
At the heart of what turned out to be Handel`s most popular opera are timeless questions about love and revenge.

24th Sep 2023

Homage to Enrico Caruso

"I had always sung as far back as I can remember, for the pure love of it." With this quotation, the Consulate General of Italy in Jerusalem together with the Jerusalem Lyric Opera Festival commemorates the 150th birthday of the legendary Italian opera singer Enrico Caruso.

The name of the great Italian opera singer Enrico Caruso is known all over the world - he had a voice of rare timbre, performed leading roles in more than 80 operas, released about 260 recordings, and was included in the Guinness Book of Records as the first performer in the history of recordings whose record sold a million copies. The concert taking place on October 23 at 20.00 in the YMCA Auditorium.

The entrance is free.

14th Sep 2023

B.Bartok Bluebeard Castle

Since Charles Perrault wrote his literary tale of Bluebeard in 1697, using, according to researchers, real-life prototypes to create the image of a sinister and ruthless aristocrat-polygamist in whose castle there is a mysterious room with the remains of his many wives, this plot has become one of the most common “wandering subjects” migrating from century to century, from one national culture to another. This folklore story offers modern authors inexhaustible themes and motives for reinterpretation and also raises eternal questions about a happy marriage, women`s destiny, and gender roles.

Jerusalem Lyric Opera presents a rare masterpiece, the unique opera of Bela Bartok Bluebeard`s Castle, in a new production by Yulia Fayn conducted by maestro Patrick Furrer, which explores the idea of love. Marta Matalon starts as Judith, opposite Markus Hollop as Duke Bluebeard.

27th May 2023

G.Bizet Carmen

Georges Bizet`s opus has existed for almost a century and a half and is one of the leaders in the modern operatic repertoire. Comparing the performances of different years and in different countries, one can see not only the diverse and colorful world of incarnations of an operatic masterpiece but also reflections of a specific historical time.

Carmen:Love and Freedom
Premiered in France in 1875, Georges Bizet’s opera Carmen (with libretto by Henri Meilhax and Ludovic Halévy, based on a novella by Prosper Mérimée) provided audiences with a main character who is not only aware of her sexuality but who knows how to use it as a source of power and self-satisfaction. Carmen is often viewed as an ambiguous protagonist of questionable morals embody a triple threat toward male characters in the opera.
For stage director Rocc "the famous story of the seductive gypsy woman is basically a social drama that raises the question of free love as a momentary unbridled passion, versus jealousy and revenge inevitably leading to destruction. Carmen and her lover, Don José, live two diametrically different lives: he is an orderly soldier aiming at an idyllic family life in the countryside, and she is a free spirit attracted to spontaneous life on the edge of society. The clash of two archetypes: orderly and rational logic versus uncivilized and chaotic exoticism. When the two worlds meet, they mutually excite each other, but as a result, they necessarily nullify each other. The conflict between normative-dogmatic social systems and free-thinking primal human instincts, as well as the eternal motive of passionate love, are no less different and relevant today." Conductor Paolo Spadaro brings together such illustrious colleagues as Marta Matalon, Alin Stoica, Michal Partyka, and others.

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