Articles by Sarah Batschelet

Lydia Steier’s colourful production of Alcina in Basel was as much a lesson in conflict resolution as it was in the power of love.

That both the lead and a second key role were ill and couldn’t sing did not bode well, yet this performance of Verdi’s Un Ballo in Maschera shook up the house nonetheless.

Johan Inger's new Peer Gynt ballet fails to convince in Basel

Two fine choreographers and the Orchestra La Scintilla heralded two world premiere performances of new ballets at the Zurich opera house.

Joseph Haydn’s opera Orlando Paladino was once cited as “a mixed salad of madness, mayhem and true love”. A recent revival in Zurich supports that assessment.

While a modern concert series staged in a one-time printing press couldn’t take the space farther from its first life, three musicians in Baden recently wrote a new kind of headline.

In the nearby city of Winterthur, Zurich’s fine International Opera Studio (IOS) recently premiered two short operas by Maurice Ravel, a flashy L’Heure espagnole and a lyrical L’Enfant et les sortilèges.

Even forty years after its world première in Rotterdam, Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui’s new production of Philip Glass’s three-act opera in Basel has particularly timely relevance.

The charm of Gaetano Donizetti’s spirited two-act L’elisir d’amore lies in its mixture of sharp comedy and poignant pathos. Zurich gave us just that.

Juan Diego Flórez stars as Goethe’s archetypal Romantic poet in Massenet's Werther in Zurich. 

Two young, widely championed string players – violinist/pianist Julia Fischer and cellist Daniel Müller-Schott – recently joined to perform an eclectic concert at the city’s stunning new concert hall.

Based on the ancient tragedies by Aeschylus, Oresteia makes a great case for composer Iannis Xenakis’s concept of “total theatre”.

Not all choreographers take on a gruelling tabletop assignment before defining the movements of a performance. Yet to reconstruct the 1895 Mariinsky Theatre production of Swan Lake, Alexei Ratmansky did just that.

Iván Fischer and the Budapest Festival Orchestra lit up Zurich’s historic Tonhalle with a stellar double-bill of Mendelssohn and Mahler.

In Gute Pässe, Schlechte Pässe (Good Passports, Bad Passports), Helena Waldmann joins the disparate artistic genres of modern dance and acrobatics to reflect divisions among ethnic groups.

In the hands of director Hans Neuenfels, the Swiss première of Manfred Trojahn’s Orest was widely anticipated for its “splashes of gore and commensurate splatters of sound”.

While premiered only some 60 years apart, the Béla Bartók and Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky works that Charles Dutoit recently conducted in the Zurich Tonhalle couldn’t have called up more disparate moods.

 Zurich’s new triple-bill ballet programme bridges the 20 and 21st centuries with choreography by three different contemporary masters: Jacopo Godani, Hans van Manen, and William Forsythe.

A young conductor and pianist recently brought a sell-out crowd to the Tonhalle in Zurich for Stravinsky, Mozart and Beethoven.

In Richard Jones' production of Don Giovanni at Theater Basel, it was the singers alone who stole the limelight.