Articles by Sarah Batschelet

Close to the start of this summer’s Lucerne Festival, Bernard Haitink conducted an outstanding performance of Mozart and Mahler works that span the centuries.

Conductor Riccardo Chailly launched this year's Lucerne Festival with a riveting programme of three late 19th century works by the great orchestral explorer, Richard Strauss.

Nestled in the alps, Musikdorf Ernen’s chamber music festival concerts recently began its annual Kammermusik Plus weeks with works that showcased some extraordinary young talents.

This summer’s production of Bizet’s Carmen on the Seebühne stage in Bregenz offers a great spectacle. 

In a new production of Franz Lehár’s The Land of Smiles, the stoic Sou-Chong sets the melancholy tone of the operetta by singing “Smile despite your sorrows and a thousand.. aches and pains”.

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.