The barihunk duo of Björn Bürger as Wolfram and Kay Stieferman as Biterolf are part of director Christof Loy’s first Wagner opera presentation for the Dutch National Opera, an updated Tannhäuser.
The production features some male nudity, but since this is Amsterdam, there weren't the howls of protest that might have greeted the opera in other cities. Since story is about the knight Tannhäuser, who is torn between carnal thoughts of Venus and the socially acceptable love for Elisabeth, Loy added scenes in a men's club and included orgies.
The remaining cast includes Ekaterina Gubanova as the alluring Venus, Stephen Milling as Landgrave Hermann, Svetlana Aksenova as Elisabeth and Daniel Kirch in the title role.
Performance continue on April 14, 18, 21, 24 & 28, and May 1st. Tickets are available online.
British audiences can enjoy Björn Bürger this summer when he takes on Papageno at the Glyndebourne Festival. Kay Stieferman has a full calendar of Wagner ahead of him, including Ein Steuerman in Tristan und Isolde at the Bayreuther Festspiele, Alberich in Oper Leipzig's Ring Cycle and Klingsor in the company's Parsifal.
Thomas Hampson and David Leigh(costume sketch courtesy of Canadian Opera)
Rufus Wainwright's second opera, "Hadrian," will open on October 13th at the Canadian Opera Company in Toronto. The opera is about a gay relationship in ancient Rome between the Roman emperor Hadrian and his lover Antinous. Daniel MacIvor's libretto was inspired by Marguerite Yourcenar's novel "Memoirs of Hadrian," which Wainwright read twenty years ago.
"Antinous and Hadrian," an opera based on the same story, was recently completed by composer Clint Borzoni and librettist Edward Ficklin, and was presented in New York in 2017 in concert form. You can hear the beautiful love scene HERE.
This is pop singer Rufus Wainwright's second attempt at opera, after "Prima Donna," which premiered at the New York City Opera in 2009, featuring barihunk Randal Turner.
Wainwright's "Hadrian" comes with an adult warning and features a musical interlude where Hadrian and Antinous make love. The cast includes the ageless barihunk Thomas Hampson as Hadrian, tenor Isaiah Bell as his lover Antinous, Karita Mattila as Plotina, bass-barihunk David Leigh as Turbo, Ambur Braid as Sabina and Ben Heppner as Dinarchus. The piece is sung in English and Latin.
The story is about Emperor Hadrian, who is devastated after his lover Antinous drowns in the Nile River. While matters of state encroach on his grief and advisers clamor for war against a radical new threat to the Empire, Hadrian slips out of time to re-encounter the vision and reality of Antinous—and learn the truth about what happened on the Nile.
There are seven performances between October 13-27 and tickets are available online.
French Canadian barihunk Étienne Dupuis will open on December 2nd as Oreste in Gluck's Iphigénie en Tauride at the Palais Garnier. It will be his role debut. The production runs until Christmas Day and tickets are available online.
Director Krzysztof Warlikowski's production returns to the Paris Opera with Véronique Gens as Iphigénie, Stanislas de Barbeyrac as Pylade and Bertrand de Billy conducting.
Gluck's emotionally charged opera retells the Greek tragedy of Iphigénie, condemned to murder her own brother, Oreste, himself a murderer.
Gluck's 1779 opera took his operatic reform to its logical conclusion. The recitatives are shorter and they are récitatif accompagné (i.e. the strings and perhaps other instruments are playing, not just continuo accompaniment). The normal dance movements that one finds in the French tragédie en musique are almost entirely absent. The drama is ultimately based on the play Iphigenia in Tauris by the ancient Greek dramatist Euripides which deals with stories concerning the family of Agamemnon in the aftermath of the Trojan War.
A nude extra (left) & Etienne Dupuis and Veronique Gens
Upcoming performances for Dupuis include Albert in Massenet's Werther at the Gran Teatre del Liceu, Pink in Another Brick in Bilodeau's The Wall at Opéra de Montréal and Jacques de Lusignan in Halévy's rarity La Reine de Chypre at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées
Garrett Obrycki in Opera Ithaca's promo for Don Giovanni
Opera Ithaca will present the latest creation of innovative director R.B. Schlather when their Don Giovanni opens on December 5th. The opera comes with an R-rated warning for containing "nudity, sexual content and violence." The opera stars the barihunk duo of Garrett Obrycki in the title role and Zachary James as the Commendatore. James was also a co-founder of the company with Lynn Craver, which launched in 2014.
We learned that the opera will open with a rape and a murder and the rest of it is about sex. There will be full nudity and partial nudity from at least two characters (one being Don Giovanni).
Garrett Obrycki sings "Bella siccome un angelo" from Donizetti's Don Pasquale:
Don Giovanni will star Philadelphia baritone Garrett Obrycki in the title role. Obrycki is a Minnesota native who receieved his Bachelor of Music in Voice from the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York. While at Eastman, he performed Tarquinius in Britten's The Rape of Lucretia and Frank Maurrant in Kurt Weill's Street Scene. After his undergraduate studies, Garrett sang as a Young Artist with the Ohio Light Opera, a chorister with Opera Philadelphia and as a member of the Philadelphia Singers. He's also a teaching artist with Opera Philadelphia.
Zachary James as Bluebeard at Opera Ithaca
Zachary James previously performed the role of the Commendatore at Central City Opera. The towering bass-barihunk aptly created the role of Abraham Lincoln in the world premiere of Philip Glass’ opera The Perfect American at the Teatro Real in Madrid, a role he reprised for London’s English National Opera and Australia’s Opera Queensland. Upcoming performance for Zachary James include La Reina with the
Prototype Festival in New York in January 2016, Liebeslieder Walzer with
the New York City Ballet also in January 2016 and The Mikado with
Anchorage Opera in April 2016.
Opera Ithaca’s production of Don Giovanni will play Ithaca’s Community School of Music and Arts Ballroom Saturday, December 5th and Sunday, December 6th at 8pm each evening. Tickets are available online.
Enjoy 18 more barihunks in our new Charity Calendar, which is on sale now.
Director Olivier Py has never been shy about featuring male nudity, whether in operas like Ambroise Thomas' Hamlet or Alban Berg's Lulu, or theater productions like Die Sonne at Volksbühne Berlin. His Hamlet featuring Stéphane Degout in the buff created quite a buzz last Spring at the Theater an der Wien. The production is now coming to the La Monnaie in Brussels starring Stéphane Degout again. He will be alternating the role with fellow barihunk Franco Pomponi.
We were also intrigued to see two of our favorite barihunks in smaller roles, Jérôme Varnier and Henk Neven. If you like shirtless guys...and lots of them...you may want to order your tickets when they go on sale October 10. Although there are thirteen performances, tickets are expected to be extremely scarce. Tickets will be available for as little as € 12.
Daniel Okulitch goes "The Full Okulitch" (Screenshot from Arte)
According to our Google Analytics, two of our most popular posts of all-time continue to be those of Gabriel Bermudez appearing nude in Poulenc's "Les mamelles de Tirésias" and Daniel Okultich appearing nude in Howard Shore's "The Fly." Until now, we've only had pictures and no video. But thanks to a European broadcast of the opera, we now have some video to share of the scene that prompted fellow barihunks Michael Mayes and Michael Todd Simpson on the Texapolitan Opera podcast to coin the phrase "The Full Okulitch" to describe a full-frontal nude scene in opera.
The Canadian barihunk can next be heard in recital at the Glenn Gould Studio on December 4th in Toronto. You can check out his profile on the CBC website where you can also listen to him discuss his status as a barihunk.
We also highly recommend that you add Okulitch's wonderful recital "The New American Art Song" to your CD collection. You can purchase it at the GPR Records website.
For the record, the only other barihunk to appear on this site other than Bermudez and Okulitch performing "The Full Okulitch" is Troy Cook. We should use this opportunity to point out that we only publish nudity if it was performed on stage. We have pictures of Leigh Melrose from "Riders to the Sea" and Laurent Alvaro from the French production of "The Fly," but felt the quality wasn't good enough to post. We also hear that there are photos of Eugene Brancoveanu from "Little Caesar," but we've never found them.
Tim McDevitt backstage during "Les mamelles de Tirésias." What's the young lady looking at so intently?
If you were to look at which opera is most popular on Barihunks based on page views by readers it might surprise some to learn that Poulenc's "Les mamelles de Tirésias" edges out Mozart's "Don Giovanni." A good reason might be that barihunks tend to bare more in this opera than in Don Giovanni, Rape of Lucretia or Pearl Fishers. Gabriel Bermudez's nude scene remains the runaway leader in terms of page views on this site.
Perhaps only "The Fly," which we presume has seen its last performance, guarantees more skin. If "The Fly" didn't provide a good night of theater, it did provide us with the term "the Full Okulitch"for a baritone who bares all. Barihunk Michael Mayes, who is one of the most entertaining people in all of opera, says that barihunk Michael Todd Simpson coined the phrase on Maye's TexapolitanOpera.com podcast. In a subsequent episode, barihunk David Adam Moore used the term and we're pretty sure it's going to stick. Hopefully, we'll have plenty of more opportunities to use the phrase.
Tim McDevitt
Tim McDevitt didn't go the Full Okulitch in his recent performance of "Les mamelles de Tirésias" with the Julliard Opera, but his appearance in his scivvies was enough to activate our inbox. One reader told us that the performances were free, making the four night run the "hottest" ticket in town. and the best bargain. McDevitt, who was recently featured on this site, played Le Mari, the same role that made Gabriel Bermudez an internet sensation.
We look forward to seeing more of this talented young singer in the future.
For more information about performances at Julliard, please visit their website.
The reputation of directors working in German opera companies is beyond mockery. Their obsession with sex, fetishism and leather, and their penchant for shock value is a running joke in opera circles. I'm beginning to wonder what type of psychological damage WW II created on the German psyche.
Spanish director Calixto Bieito has taken it to another level with his production of Gluck's "Armide" at the Komische Oper in Berlin. I'm not quite sure what to make of this production, which is usually about vengeance, magic, love, fulfillment and abandonment.
Bieito has made it about sex, obsession and more sex. One German paper called it porno-opera. I'm not certain who is in these pictures, but I think that the naked guy is tenor Peter Lodahl. I've got to believe that one of those bare butts or danglers is a baritone, so these photos have earned a spot on Barihunks.
I can't think of a better way to ring in the New Year than with a barihunk in the buff. Also, a new year seems like an appropriate way to introduce viewers (readers?) to a new barihunk.
Meet Laurent Alvaro, who was Seth Brendle in the second cast of The Fly at Chatelet. My understanding is that he only performed one night, leaving the rest of the performances to Daniel Okulitch, a favorite on this site. Okulitch also performed every night in L.A.
Alvaro is a 36-year-old French baritone who performs primarily in France. He has appeared in other Barihunk operas, most notably Thais and Midsummer Night's Dream. From the pictures on his website, he's apparently not afraid to show a little skin.
I flew to Los Angeles to see (and hear) Daniel Okulitch in Howard Shore's "The Fly." Unfortunately, it failed to live up to the buzz. Daniel Okulitch, fortunately, kept his barihunk credentials in tact, but it was about the only redeeming thing about this opera.
Perhaps the reviewer from the Orange County Register summed it up most succinctly:
Let's not mince words. That's always the best way. Just rip the bandage off quickly. Howard Shore's "The Fly," which was given its U.S. premiere Sunday afternoon courtesy of Los Angeles Opera, is the worst opera I've ever seen.
Barichunk Wolfang Koch seems to have some German koch hanging over his head in this production of Busoni's "Doktor Faust" from the Bavarian State Opera.
Do I hear a chorus of "It's Raining Men" breaking out?
