Barihunk duo in Monteverdi's L'Orfeo

Damien Pass and Alex Rosen

OPERA2DAY is teaming up with the Nederlandse Reisopera and Studio Drift to produce Claudio Monteverdi's L’Orfeo, often considered to be the first successful opera. Monteverdi referred to the piece as a "favola in musica," in which “all the actors are to sing their parts.”

Barihunks Damien Pass will sing Spirito and Alex Rosen will take on Caronte in a cast that also includes Samuel Boden as Orfeo, Kristen Witmer as Eurydice, Yannis François as Plutone and Laurence Kilsby as Apollo.

Hernán Schvartzman will conduct the orchestra of La Sfera Armoniosa on period instruments.  There will be ten performance  production can be viewed 10 times in January and February in theatres throughout the Netherlands starting in Enschede on January 25, then traveling to Leeuwarden, Maastricht, Utrecht, Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Zwolle, Arnheim and ending in Den Haat on February 22.

OPERA2DAY in Den Haag is a company founded to bring opera to new audiences by presenting old standards in contemporary settings. They often condense the opera to shorter running times.

Damien Pass' legendary strip tease in Agrippina

At the time when Monteverdi was composing L’Orfeo,  he was dealing with the recent death of his first wife Claudia and 18-year-old star soprano Caterina Martinelli. These events inspired him to compose some of the most beautiful music of love and mournful tunes ever written in opera.

Australian baritone Damien Pass has performed many baroque roles including Handel's Lucifero (La resurrezione), Zoroastro (Orlando) and Pallante (Agrippina), as well as Rameau's Borée (Les Boréades). After L'Orfeo, he head to Opéra de Lille to sing Pistola in Verdi's Falstaff.

American bass Alex Rosen is also not stranger to early music, having performed Seneca in Monteverdi’s L’incoronazione di Poppea with Cincinnati Opera, Haydn’s Creation and Handel’s Acis and Galatea with Les Arts Florissants and Somnus and Cadmus in Handel’s Semele with Opera Philadelphia.

Damien Pass in "Jakob Lenz" at Festival le Balcon

Damien Pass

Australian barihunk Damien Pass (whose birthday is today), is taking on the role of Oberlin in Wolfgang Rihm's one act chamber opera Jakob Lenz at the Festival le Balcon at the Athénée Théâtre Louis-Jouvet in Paris. The title role is being sung by Vincent Vantyghem, as regular with Maxime Pascal’s contemporary Ensemble Le Balcon. Vantyghem has also sung the role at the Dialogues Festival in Salzburg. 

The opera runs through March 29th and tickets are available online. 

The opera was first performed at the Hamburg Staatsoper in 1979 with the late English baritone Richard Salter in the title role. It has subsequently been performed at the Wiener Festwochen and at Oper Stuttgart with Georg Nigl, Teatro Comunale di Bolgna with Tomas Möwes, Theater Bielefeld with Evgueniy Alexiev and at the English National Opera with Andrew Shore. 

The opera Jakob Lenz is based on the novella "Lenz" by Georg Büchner which deals with an incident in the life of the German poet. Lenz, who along with Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, formed the “Sturm und Drang” (Storm and Stress) movement in German literature which made German authors the cultural leaders of Europe during the 18th century. 

Jakob Lenz at the Athénée Théâtre (Photo: © Le Balcon)

The source of Büchner's material comes from the diaries of the social reformer and priest Johann Friedrich Oberlin, which detail the activities of his house guest, who was clearly suffering from mental illness at the time.  The suicidal poet stayed with Oberlin in a small village in the Vosges Mountains near the German-French border in the hope of recovering from his depression.

Büchner's opening pages describing the mountain landscape and hinting at Lenz's inner state with the single sentence "he did not feel at all tired, only it sometimes annoyed him that he could not walk on his hands instead of his feet" are reduced to a stage direction, but the rest of the libretto roughly follows Büchner's outline. A key element of the libretto deals with his trauma around the death of a small child whom was he was unable to resuscitate.

At the end of Lenz's life he lived with Goethe's brother-in-law, Johann Georg Schlosser, where he lived in poverty.  After years of increasingly poor physical health and debilitating mental problems, Lenz died on the streets of Moscow 1792.

Barihunk duo in Paris Opera's Faust

Ildar Abdrazakov and Damien Pass

The Opéra national de Paris has put together a dream cast for their upcoming production of Gounod's Faust, which opens on March 2nd. It'll will be headed by two barihunks, Ildar Abdrazakov and Damien Pass, who are Méphistophélès and Valentin respectively. Two of the most amazing tenors in the business, Piotr Beczala and Michael Fabiano, will be alternating nights as Faust, while the thrilling soprano Krassimira Stoyanova takes on Marguerite.

Performances run through March 28th and tickets are available online.

After Faust, Abdrazakov heads to the Salzburg Easter Festival for two performances of the Verdi Requiem on March 31st and April 3. Pass will remain at the Bastille to sing the Hunter in Dvorak’s Rusalka from April 3-26 in a Robert Carsen production.

Eleven Baritones Competing in Operalia; Broadcast Live on August 30th

Dan Kempson from the 2013 Barihunks Calendar

Eleven of the 40 singers in next week's Operalia Competition in Los Angeles are barihunk. Competing are Igor Bakan, Aleksey Bogdanov, Alexandre Duhamel, Dan Kempson, Alexey Lavrov, Alex Lawrence, Shea Owens, Damien Pass, Pavel Shmulevich, Anatoli Sivko and Ivan Thirion. Dan Kempson, Alex Lawrence and Damian Pass have been featured regularly on barihunks over the years

Daniel Kempson sings Pierrot's Tanzlied:

Operalia, was created by the legendary tenor Plácido Domingo and is in its third season and has instantly become one of the premiere vocal competitions in the world. The singers will compete over the course of one week, with the ten finalists performing on a concert at the Dorothy Chandler Pavillion on August 30th. If you can't make the concert, it will broadcast live on Medici.tv beginning at 7 PM PST.

Sebastian Geyer in rare version of Orpheus myth

Sebastian Geyer in The Elixir of Love

German barihunk Sebastian Geyer, who we first introduced to readers back in 2010, is starring in Telemann’s rarely performed opera "Orpheus oder Die Wunderbare Bestängigkeit Der Liebe" (Orpheus or The Wonderful Constancy of Love). The production opened last night at the Oper Frankfurt and runs through June 8th. Tickets and additional information are available online. 

The opera tells of the destructive power of love from Eurydice's point of view. The myth of Orpheus is one of the best loved stories in literary and operatic history, at its center the power of music and love between Orpheus and Eurydice. In Telemann's version,  Orasia the Queen of Trace, who is in love with Orpheus plays a larger role than in versions by other composers. There also is no happy ending, as the composer/librettist ban all three main characters to the underworld.

Telemann’s Orpheus has often been dismissed as a pastiche because it included some well known passages from Handel and Lully operas. But the opera was a brave experiment that broke musical and dramaturgical boundaries. Telemann combined his own, strongly protestant, cantata forms with the sensuality of Italian opera and the courtly glamor of France. 

Sebastian Geyer in Orpheus at the Frankfurt Oper

Sebastian Geyer has become a leading baritone at the Oper Frankfurt, where he has sung Aeneas in Purcell's Dido and Aeneas, Conte Almaviva in Mozart's Le nozze di Figaro, Guglielmo in Mozart's Così fan tutte, Papageno in Mozart's Die Zauberflöte, Dr. Falke in Strauß' Die Fledermaus and the title role in Handel's Giulio Cesare. He also has appeared on the company's recording of Richard Wagner's Die Feen.

On September 5th, he'll switch to Puccini as he sings Schaunard with the company in La bohème. He then travels to Wuppertal to sing the title role in Mozart's Don Giovanni in a cast that includes fellow barihunk Damien Pass as Masetto. 

NEWS ALERT: Damien Pass wins Paris Opera Vocal Competition

Damien Pass

We have just learned that Australian barihunk Damien Pass has won the top prize today at the l'Opéra de Paris competition (A.R.O.P.). Pass continues the amazing winning streak by barihunks in vocal competitions and he'll take home € 5,000. Also awarded a top prize was Polish soprano Ilona Krzywicka. Almost exactly a year ago, Pass won  the "Voice Prize" at the 6th Nadia and Lili Boulanger International Voice-Piano Competition.

His 2012-13 season currently includes singing the title role in Opera de Dijon’s production of Dukas’ Ariane et Barbe-Bleue.

In recent seasons Damien Pass returned to the ensemble at Paris Opera and sang the role of Frank in Kurt Weill’s Street Scene, appeared in concert at the Louvre, performed Mahler’s Das Knaben Wunderhorn at the Bastille, and sang arias by Mozart and Rossini at the Palais Garnier. He also sang Inigo in L’Heure Espagnole with Maison de la Musique de Nanterre; appeared as soloist with the Britten-Pears Orchestra in Aldeburgh to sing Handel’s Saul;was a member of the ensemble at Paris Opera and participated in Glimmerglass Opera’s prestigious Young American Artists Program, where he sang the role of Marquis d’Obigny in La traviata, covered the role of Alidoro in La Cenerentola and, in a previous season, covered the role of Capellio in Bellini’s I Capuleti e i Montecchi.

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Catching up with Damien Pass in France

Damien Pass

When we last featured Aussie barihunk Damien Pass in 2007, he had recently graduated from Oberlin, had won and Encouragement Award from the Marilyn Horne Foundation Competition and was starting to get small roles in places like Glimmerglass Opera, Opera Theatre of Saint Louis, Opera North and the Music Academy of the West. Somehow we lost track of him until we received an email recently asking why he wasn't included in our poll of sexiest Aussie barihunks.

We're pleased to announce that we found him in France, where he's been singing smaller roles at the Paris Opera.  He's performed Don Inigo (L’heure Espagnole, Ravel), Frank Maurrant (Street Scene, Weill), Lucas (Les Troqueurs, Dauvergne), and the Marquese (Mirandolina, Martinů) with the Atelier Lyrique at the Paris Opera.

Damien Pass sings Aaron Copland's "At the River":

In September 2001, Pass made his Parisian recital debut with the Fesival les journées romantiques with a program that included Aaron Copland, Franz Liszt, Cole Porter, Franz Schubert and Henri Duparc.

He's also made his mark outside of France, singing the title role in Handel’s Saul with the Britten-Pears Orchestra conducted by Richard Egarr in Aldeburgh.

 Damien Pass sings Aaron Copland's "Long Time Ago":

Pass will next be seen March 15th at the Palais Garnier in a program of Massenet with the Paris Opera Orchestra. A week later he'll be part of a concert of music by Franz Schubert, Hugo Wolf et Richard Wagner at the Goethe Institute in Paris. We'll try to keep better tabs on this promising young talent in the future.

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