Barihunk Fabio Lesuisse and mezzo Rina Hirayama(Photo: Theater Aachen)
Germany's Theater Aachen near the Belgian border managed to get our attention with their gorgeous poster for Purcell's Dido & Aeneas. The shirtless model happens to be Belgian barihunk Fabio Lesuisse, who is making his role debut as Aeneas in the opera. The work will premiere on June 23, with additional shows on June 29 and July 5. The company is partnering with the School for Music and Dance in Cologne for this production. (Frustratingly, the Theater Aachen website does not list cast members for the show, but you can find them at the School for Music and Dance in Cologne website). Tickets are available online.
Purcell's Dido & Aeneas is based on Book IV of Virgil's Aeneid. It recounts the love of Dido, Queen of Carthage, for the Trojan hero Aeneas, and her despair when he abandons her. A monumental work in Baroque opera, Dido & Aeneas is remembered as one of Purcell's foremost theatrical works.
Belgian barihunk Fabio Lesuisse is a graduate of the Cologne
University of Music and First Prize winner at the 2015 Bach Competition
in Barcelona, Spain.
He is currently a guest artist at the Theater Aachen in Germany, where this season he has also performed Mercutio in Gounod's Roméo et Juliette and Junior in Bernstein's A Quiet Place.
He has performed the title role in T.J. Hermann's Hamlet at the Theater Dortmund, as well as numerous roles at Oper Bonn, including Morales in Bizet's Carmen, Ned Keene in Britten's Peter Grimes, Marco in Puccini's Gianni Schicchi and Ramiro in Ravel's L'heure Espagnole.
The National Theatre in Brno is presenting a double-bill of Bohuslav Martinů's rarely performed Epic of Gilgamesh along with Henry Purcell frequently performed Dido and Aeneas from May 13 to June 10.
The cast is loaded with barihunks, including David Nykl, who we introduced to readers back in 2014, and Ondrej Mraz, who are alternating the bass role in the Martinů and the Sorceress in the Purcell.
Jiří Brückler and Jiří Hájek are alternating the baritone part in the Martinů and Aeneas in the Purcell.
Martinů created the Epic of Gilgamesh at the height of his exile period while staying in the South of France, only four years before his death. He reached for the oldest surviving literary text, and in composing his work employed the universally recognized translation into Elizabethan English made in 1928 by the archaeologist and Oxford professor Reginald Campbell Thompson. Deeply captivated by the epic from the dawn of Babylonian history, Martinů only began the compositional work after meditating on the philosophical essence of the text for several years.
Listen to a complete recording of the Epic of Gilgamesh here:
The Epic of Gilgamesh consists of three parts of almost equal length: Gilgamesh, The Death of Enkidu, and Invocation. It is scored for soloists (soprano, tenor, baritone and bass), narrator, mixed choir and orchestra. Martinů wrote it for Paul Sacher’s chamber orchestra, a fact reflected in the score. Although Martinů said that he “would need to express himself with greater orchestral might”, the sound of Gilgamesh is monumental.
The work was premiered in January 1958 in Basil, Switzerland. Martinů presented his idea of semi-staging the work to the conductor, desiring to “animate” Gilgamesh, to create “an illusion of action.” However, Sacher rejected the idea and performed the work as a concert oratorio.
Ondrej Mráz, who is new to this site studied voice at the University of Performing Arts in Bratislava and graduated in 2006. He became a soloist of the State Theatre in Košice and won the Literary Fund Prize for his portrayal of Mephistopheles in Gounod's Faust. At the National Theatre, he has appeared as Luther and Crespel in Offenbach's Les contes d'Hoffmann, Dulcamara in Donizetti's L'elisir d'amore, Titurel in Wagner's Parsifal and Count Vilém in Dvořák's The Jacobin.
32-year-old Jiří Brückler was born in Liberec in northern Bohemia, where he started his career in music as a member of various children’s choirs. He then studied voice at the Prague Conservatory and the Academy of Music in Prague. He performs regularly at the National Theatre in Prague and the State Opera in Prague.
John Ward Taylor (left) and as Aeneas with Carla Jablonski as Dido (right)
John Taylor Ward will be appearing as Aeneas with Heartbeat Opera. The company, along with Cantata Profana, has reimagined productions of Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor and Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas.
Lucia di Lammermoor has been condensed to 90 minutes so that it can be performed as a double-bill with Dido and Aeneas. You can see them individually or together on March 12, 16 and 20 at the Theater at St. Clement’s in New York City. You can see individual performances of Lucia on March 18 and of Dido on March 11 and 19. Tickets and additional information is available online.
John Taylor Ward sings Monteverdi with Voices of Music:
John Taylor Ward was born into a musical family in Boone, North Carolina that featured bluegrass and Broadway tunes. He is also the associate artistic director of the Lakes Area Music Festival.
Ward's Carnegie Hall debut, singing Schütz’s Fili mi Absalon, was listed among Superconductor’s best concerts of 2012, and, in the realm of vocal chamber music, he has made numerous appearances with the eight-voice ensemble Roomful of Teeth, whose debut album recently topped many 2013 album-of-the-year lists, including WNYC’s Soundcheck. As a founding member of the New Haven-based Cantata Profana, Taylor recently performed Sir Peter Maxwell Davies’ 8 Songs for a Mad King.
Joyce DiDonato is one of only three non-baritones to be bestowed "Honorary Barihunk" status and for good reason. The latest is her recent performance at the Stonewall Inn in New York City in honor of Mark Carson, a gay man who was killed nearby in a senseless hate crime.
The idea of a murder happening blocks away from the Stonewall Inn is
incomprehensible to me," DiDonato says. "It shouldn't happen anywhere.
It tells me that we're not done talking, and we are not done working for
people to comprehend what equality is about and why it is important."
Joyce DiDonato performing at the Stonewall Inn on NPR:
The mezzo-soprano sang "When I am Laid in Earth" from Henry Purcell's opera Dido and Aeneas, which includes the line "Remember me, but ah! forget my fate."
This isn't the first time that the singer has taken a very public and very musical stand on the issue. In 2013, she performed "Over the Rainbow" at the Proms in London devoting it to LGBT voices silenced by Russia's anti-gay laws. At the Santa Fe Opera, she dedicated a performance to a gay New Mexican teen who committed suicide after being bullied.
By the way, the first four letters of Joyce's last name spell DIDO.
We originally introduced 31-year-old Croatian barihunk Krešimir Stražanac to readers after a picture of him that we posted of him working out went viral with our readers on Facebook.
Last season at the Zurich Opera, Stražanac sang Bello in Puccini's La fanciulla del West, the Second Nazarene in Richard Strauss' Salome, Fleville in Giordano's Andrea Chenier and Hermann in Offenbach's Les contes d'Hoffmann. This season he'll be keeping his beautiful voice in shape with lots of Johann Sebastian Bach at some amazing churches and cathedrals.
On March 7th, he'll be at the famed Herkulesaal Church in Munich singing the St. John's Passion with Concerto Köln and the Bayerischen Rundfunks Chorus and tenor Julian Prégardien as the Evangelist. The concert will be repeated the next night at the Partenkirchen in Garmisch.
Krešimir Stražanac sings Frank Martin, Schubert and Wolf:
On March 14th, he'll perform Bach's "Ich hab in Gottes Herz und Sinn, BWV 92" and "Herr Jesu Christ, wahr’r Mensch
und Gott, BWV 127" with the WDR Sinfonieorchester in Cologne under
Reinhard Goebel.
In April, he takes on St. John's Passion at the Strifskirche in Stuttgat before returning to Cologne in May for Bach's "Gott fahret auf mit Jauchzen, BWV 128."
If you want to catch him in opera, you'll have to wait until August when he sings Aeneas in Henry Purcell's Dido and Aeneas at the Osor Summer Festival in his native Croatia.
Henk Neven & Vivica Geneaux in Dido & Aeneas at Rouen
You can watch an entire performance of Purcell's Dido & Aeneas from Opéra de Rouen Haute-Normandie with an all-star cast featuring barihunk Henk Neven as Aeneas, Vivica Genaux as Dido, Ana Quintans as Belinda and Marc Mauillon as the magician. The entire production was magically staged, directed and choreographed by the team of Cécile Roussat and Julien Lubek. You won't want want to miss the opportunity to watch this!
If you want to see the performance live, it will be reprised at Versailles with two performances daily on June 14 and 15. You can book online. From May 23-25, Versailles is also presenting the barihunk-laden performance of Lully's Persée that we recently featured starring Olivier Laquerre, Vasil Garanliev, Stephen Hegedus and Curtis Sullivan.
The leads for new barihunks keep coming in from Germany and we're grateful for it, as it has introduced us to some amazing new talent. The latest is Sebastian Geyer who just created a sensation as Aeneas in Purcell's "Dido and Aeneas" at the Frankfurt Opera, which was being shown on a double bill with Bartok's "Bluebeard's Castle." The German press hailed Geyer's performance as a "perfect portrayal." You can read a review in the Frankfurt Allgemeiner.
Sebastian Geyer as Papageno
Geyer has been regularly cast in Mozart's "Big 3" as Count Almaviva in Le Nozze di Figaro, Papageno in Die Zauberflote, as well as roles in Don Giovanni. In addition to his performances in Frankfurt, his career has centered around the German cities of Heidelberg, Mannheim and Stuttgart. He has also established himself as a concert performer and sings lieder ranging from Schubert to Wolfgang Rihm.
Geyer is next scheduled to appear in Wagner's rarely performed opera Die Feen in May 2011 at the Oper Frankfurt.
Our best posts come from our readers, so send us your comments, suggestions and Messiah listings to Barihunks@gmail.com
As David Adam Moore wraps up his run as his run at La Scala, we thought that people on the East Coast would want to know that he's heading to Glimmerglass to perform in Purcell's Dido and Aeneas. He'll be performing in the Jonathan Miller production from August 2-23 and you can get more information here: http://www.glimmerglass.org/season/opera4.html. We have a feeling that this is a production that's not to be missed.
For those of you on the West Coast, you can see Dido and Aeneas with the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra with soprano Susan Graham and baritone William Berger (for you red head lovers). Click here for information: http://philharmonia.org/nov09.html.
We decided to post some random pictures of DAM for your pleasure. From top to bottom: Pearl Fishers in Seattle, Billy Budd in Israel, at a Gotham Chamber Opera fund raiser, and Demetrius at La Scala.
