Find classical music concert, opera, ballet and dance reviews | Theater an der Wien

Hagen, the first chapter in the Theater an der Wien's reimagining of The Ring, features music from Das Rhinegold and Götterdämmerung woven seamlessly together, telling the story from the perspective of Hagen, son of Nibelung dwarf, Alberich.

Tatjana Gürbaca’s whole scale tampering with Wagner’s Siegfried had so many flashbacks and flashforwards there should have been a warning for photosensitive members of the audience.  

Beethoven lovers were expecting an authentic recreation of the first version of Fidelio but instead they got Leonore à la Jacobs.

An outstanding cast under Ottavio Dantone at the Theater an der Wien was headed by Lawrence Zazzo and Emőke Baráth.

Without glitz, extravagance or the need to be expressly shocking, Robert Carsen's new production of Wozzeck at the Theater an der Wien is exceptional.

Ann Hallenberg shines in an amazing cast in a concert performance of Handel's Ottone in Vienna. 

At the Theater an der Wien, director Mariame Clément and novelist Lucy Wadham have crafted innovative material that brings the old-fashioned lyrics to life in a coherent and contemporary dramatic setting.

Anno Schreier's successful new opera Hamlet is the first of a series of three Shakespeare-inspired offerings from Theater an der Wien this season. 

A very creative reading – both scenically and musically – of Engelbert Humperdinck’s fairy tale opera Hänsel und Gretel for Theater an der Wien's final production of the season at the Kammeroper.

Early Mozart opera seria triumphs in Vienna’s ‘other house’.

Requiring trained opera singers to focus primarily on acting and asking actors to sing in a renowned opera house puts everyone out of their comfort zone, which is not necessarily a bad thing.

Though certainly not the most heartwarming of tales this Christmas season, this is a production one shouldn’t miss.

I have no objection per se with naked women bathing in blood, masturbating to crucifixes or being flagellated by priests in confessional booths, but only if it somehow aids understanding of the story

“Acting is the expression of a neurotic impulse. It’s a bum’s life,” stated the late, great Marlon Brando. Felix Breisach took this idea to heart when staging his modernized Figaro in a mental institution.

Every operatic ingredient was thrown into the pot for H.K. Gruber's Geschichten aus dem Wiener Wald (Tales from the Vienna Woods), but do too many cooks spoil this operatic broth?

Not the Barbiere you might have been expecting if you hadn't paid attention to the small print at the Theater an der Wien... 

The Stepford wife, the doubting priest, the guilt-ridden adulteress, the family black sheep and the outsted, suicidal CEO:  staples in television dramas but surprising finds in Handel oratorio.

It often takes time to adjust to Nikolaus Harnoncourt's tempi, but this concert performance of Mozart's Le nozze di Figaro enabled the audience to discover new colours in a well known score. 

Out of the swamp: Marcel Beekman rocks the house in Robert Carsen’s glittering take on Platée.

If you are going to see Verdi’s I due Foscari, this production is likely the way to do it. Although this production is by no means unflawed, there are several reasons that it is a must-see for opera fans in Vienna.

An excellent cast headed by Franco Fagioli makes this concert version of Rinaldo at the Theater an der Wien unforgettable; Il Pomo d'Oro shine in the pit.

Schubert's unfinished oratorio Lazarus joined with other interesting works by both Schubert and Charles Ives in a staged performance at the Theater an der Wien, directed by Claus Guth. Strongly cast, the musical juxtaposition works better than the oratorio itself, and the rather cold dramaturgy.

Come for the singing, enjoy the music and bring your sunglasses: this psychologically charged Idomeneo at the Theater an der Wien is not to be missed.

Iain Bell’s new opera A Harlot’s Progress, premièred at the Theater an der Wien this month, has much going for it. Its chances for making it into modern repertory are good – if people can handle the depressing plot.

My mother always told me not to sit too close in the theatre, and after seeing this revival of Martin Kusej’s modern realization of Stravinksy’s The Rake’s Progress at the Theater an der Wien, I think I know what she was talking about.Act I begins innocuously enough in a sparse apartment, unfurnished apart from a mattress and a television.

Giuseppe Verdi’s Attila is not an opera that one hears often. Composed during his self-styled “galley period” – before he found his mature musical voice with Rigoletto – Attila has inherent musical and dramaturgical weaknesses. With one foot still firmly rooted in bel canto tradition, the numerous cabalettas can be exhausting, even ridiculous, considering the dramatic nature of the text.

Il Trovatore has doggedly survived in opera’s hit charts despite dispensing generous quantities of hair-raising as well as eyebrow-raising content. Verdi’s music is intoxicating, of course, but there is something to this work that makes it accessible beyond reasoning.

Béatrice et Bénédict is Hector Berlioz’s last work; he wrote it between 1860 and 1862 for the theatre that patron Edouard Bénazet had built in Baden-Baden, then Germany’s most chic health resort.

The Theater an der Wien has a storied history with Fidelio, having hosted the première of the work’s first and second versions in 1805 and 1806 respectively.

In times where musical luxury is sometimes associated with having a pop star perform a short “Happy Birthday” and a handful of songs in a private performance – and for a usually undisclosed (and indecent) fee, having a whole piece of music composed for an occasion, or organising a private performance by a famous orchestra, is almost unimaginable.

When Jean-Christophe Spinosi stepped onto the podium to conduct Le Comte Ory that night, he didn’t wait for his applause to cease, but instantly cued a hearty forte from the Ensemble Matheus, and consequently a few incredulous looks from the audience.

Born in 1920 to a Venetian bandmaster, Bruno Maderna became famous during his formative years as a violin prodigy and was told by his grandfather that he could gravitate to the mafia later in life and God would still look kindly on one who played the violin so wonderfully.

When the Theater an der Wien’s in-house magazine featured an article about costumes created by none other than Christian Lacroix for this new production of Radamisto, I was intrigued by the pictures, but also a bit nonplussed by the idea that his gowns had been hand-painted in order to illustrate the different levels of Radamisto’s nightmare.

Institutional violence has been a running theme in Torsten Fischer’s series of Gluck operas at the Theater an der Wien, albeit with a lid kept firmly on the idea of actual conflict.

A cast of five countertenors and one tenor performing an opera by Handel contemporary Leonardo Vinci may look like a long evening to those who don’t appreciate the high male voice, but Baroque lovers hoping for a triplet and trill fest as well as some vocal drag got all they wanted in this concert version of Artaserse.

It was a touching moment when an overwhelmed Joyce DiDonato re-entered the stage after her fourth encore and covered her face with her hands for a few moments, not sure what to do in response to the unceasing applause.

Following a string of misses, the Theater an der Wien emerges from its recent dry patch with a new production of Puccini’s triptych which offers a winning cast, the best playing heard at the house in months, and a smart production.

Productions of Monteverdi’s Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria which make the title character a returning war veteran, preferably one returning from a juicy topical war, are nothing new, and director Claus Guth doesn’t stretch the well-worn conceit much further in this listlessly vague staging for the Theater an der Wien.

The risen Christ and a dramatic figure who resists the Christian promise of redemption make for odd conceptual bedfellows, not least of all in a Vienna Philharmonic programme which here saw Messiaen’s L’Ascension sandwiched between the Schumann and Tchaikovsky treatments of Byron’s Manfred.

There is a famous scene in the noir classic The Third Man in which Joseph Cotten returns to his hotel and is swiftly bundled into a cab that speeds off recklessly through the streets of Vienna.

Written in 1819 and belonging to the opera seria chapter of Rossini’s career, the florid score of La donna del lago doesn’t so much respond to as resist its unabashedly romantic libretto.

The venerable Viennese tradition of airing dirty operatic laundry in public found an unlikely proponent this season in the form of the Theater an der Wien’s mild-mannered director Roland Geyer, who, unhappy with William Friedkin’s production of The Tales of Hoffmann in March, abruptly sacked the American director and announced he would devise a new staging himself a matter of months before the

Deborah Warner’s new production of La Traviata for the Wiener Festwochen is dotted with dramatic ideas to much the same extent as flowers are strewn and champagne is uncorked in the Act I ‘Brindisi’ (drinking song), which is to say sparingly.

Ambroise Thomas’s Hamlet has riled and infuriated ever since its 1868 première, though for many it is merely an object of derision: one 1869 correspondent to the satirical magazine Punch admits not having seen the work but nevertheless disparages it as ‘Omelette’, a musical ‘burlesque’, and pillories Thomas’s fondness for drinking songs with the lines ‘To drink or not to drink? That

They are sadly few in number, but some things in this St. John Passion I can report in mildly positive terms would include Stephen Layton’s hand-selected choir Polyphony, whose members dealt with Bach’s demanding vocal lines capably and sang in clear, idiomatic German; bass-baritone Neal Davies (a perfectly respectable if not overly engaging Christ); and Derek Welton’s robustly s

Director William Friedkin doesn’t put a dramaturgical foot wrong in his Theater an der Wien production of The Tales of Hoffmann and yet doesn’t challenge, or even engage with, any of the opera’s Romantic positions.

This opening concert to Vienna OsterKlang festival was a reproduction of sorts: on 5th April 1803 a slate of Beethoven works including the first and second symphonies, the third piano concerto and the oratorio Christus am Ölberge was performed in this very theatre.

The ‘semi-opera’ was an English musical and spoken theatre hybrid which by the end of the 17th century had begun to scrape the bottom of Restoration drama’s literary barrel, and by the 18th had been rendered obsolete by efforts to introduce the English to formal opera from the continent.

With two happy endings, two recognition scenes, and a second act that seems more of a self-contained sequel than a conclusion to the first, Gluck’s Telemaco has come in for a musicological pasting over the years for its alleged weaknesses of dramatic content and construction.

Iolanta and Francesca da Rimini work particularly well as a double bill because both works share the theme of lovers who find themselves at the mercy of possessive forces. Iolanta's domineering father ultimately yields in Tchaikovsky's opera, but in Rachmaninov's the deceitful Lanceotto is not so accommodating.