Bo Skovhus

Richard Strauss' last stage work is an opera about opera as an art form, depicting the creation of a music drama in a wise and witty way. Which came first the words or the music? That is the question Strauss and his librettist Clemens Krauss address through the story of a Countess torn between a composer and a poet.

At the heart of Věc Makropulos is a recipe for a life-prolonging elixir invented by the doctor Hieronymus Makropulos for Emperor Rudolf II. It was tested on the doctor's beautiful daughter, who has now been on earth for 337 years and has had countless affairs over the generations. In the end, however, the seemingly young woman has to realize that an endless life on this side of the world only brings loneliness.

Titus and Berenice love each other; under the watchful eye of Antiochus, the hopeless lover, they try yet refuse to understand each other. Taking up the “majestic sadness” of these alexandrines, among the greatest verses in the French language, Michael Jarrell amplifies the power of words, making them a vehicle for spaces and identities that, from Rome to Jerusalem, are unceasingly questioned.

Hans Werner Henze’s “The Raft of the Medusa” is directly inspired by Théodore Géricault’s famous painting. The German composer sets to music the fate of 150 people who have been shipwrecked and abandoned to their destiny. This is a radical work that fluctuates between hope and inevitability, agony and sudden bursts of life. The Raft of the Medusa is an oratorio that was first performed in 1968. Fifty years on, the Italian director Romeo Castellucci underscores its immense modernity, drawing a striking parallel between Hans Werner Henze’s work and the current migrant crisis in the Mediterranean.

Lotfi Mansouri's spectacular last production as General Director of The San Francisco Opera with Yvonne Kenny making her debut in the title role, new dialogue specially commissioned from Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, Wendy Wasserstein and an original ballet to set the scene ‘Chez Maxime’ bringing fresh insight into Lehár's classic operetta. This production also features another world premiere, Njegus's song, ‘Quite Parisian’.

Alban Berg explores the power that Eros and Thanatos, in their rawest forms, have over our lives: Lulu, a femme fatale, will do anything to get ahead in a man’s world, but she ends up being destroyed.

German director Claus Guth´s Mozart-Da Ponte trilogy was concluded at the 2009 Salzburg Festival with Cosí fan tutte featuring a starry cast including Miah Persson, Bo Skovhus, Isabel Leonard as well as Patricia Petibon. Adam Fischer conducts the Vienna Philharmonics. Those familiar with Claus Guth´s previous work such as the psychoanalytic Nozze di Figaro, the Don Giovanni set amongst junkies in a wood in the middle of the night, the Ariadne who commits suicide on Naxos, Richard Wagners Tristan in love with Mathilde Wesendonck and a Walküre set in a miniature dolls house will know better than to expect a bubbly Mozartian comedy.

Stage director Frank Castorf “might have been born to direct From the House of the Dead” (Opera Today). His gritty, visually striking adaptation brings bold modern and postmodern touches to Janáček’s masterwork without ever overshadowing the intense forward momentum of the music, conducted to dramatic perfection by Simone Young and sung by an all-star cast in Munich. Janáček adapted Dostoevsky for this powerfully compelling opera set in a Siberian prison camp, full of starkly contrasting moods and motifs, unusual in its episodic structure. The last opera Janáček ever composed, its third act was on his desk when he died in 1928; attempts by his students to “complete” his orchestration have largely fallen away over the decades in favor of the original version. Despite the grimness of the setting and the brutality of several characters, the composer’s compassion shines through in tender moments, movingly illustrating his motto for the work: “in every creature, a spark of God.”

This release contains the celebrated 2006 production of Mozart's Nozze di Figaro that was directed for the stage by Claus Guth at that year's Salzburg Festival. Ildebrando D'Arcangelo takes the title role, and gets support from Anna Netrebko as Sussanna, Bo Skovhus as Il Conte Di Almaviva, and Dorothea Roschmann as La Contessa. Nikolaus Harnoncourt conducts the orchestra.

Aribert Reimann's "Lear" is a milestone in the tragic opera of the 20th century. Ever since it's 1978 premiere at the Bavarian State Opera in Munich, it has made it's triumphal progress around the world in more than thirty productions as the most successful Shakespeare opera of our time. The remorseless logic of the action and plot and the primal force of irresistible sonic fantasies give this work the power to hold the attention of it's listeners and viewers from the first moment to the last. The great theme of self-deception is fancifully portrayed in this captivating stage production by Karoline Gruber with a retreat into the interior of a far from frail old man. It is not senility that drives Lear, brilliantly sung by Bo Skovhus, into isolation but his hyperactive ego. The first Hamburg performance of Lear is a musical achievement of the highest order.

Riccardo Muti leads the Orchestra of the Wiener Staatsoper in this performance of Mozart's opera, recorded live in 1996. The performers include Barbara Frittoli, Angelika Kirchschlager, Angelika Kirchschlager and Michael Schade.

At the Bayerische Staatsoper in Munich, Kirill Petrenko conducts this new production of Alban Berg's Lulu, directed for stage by Dmitri Tcherniakov and starring the soprano Marlis Petersen (Lulu).

When Strauss and Hofmannsthal wrote «Der Rosenkavalier» – setting it in an imaginary Rococo Vienna and yet closely linked to the decadent fin de siècle – they created a profound social comedy. It is not without melancholy that the Marschallin lets her young lover Octavian go when he falls head over heels with Sophie, who hails from Faninal’s bourgeois household. As voluptuous as Strauss' score is, it contains tender moments of dream and melancholy. Director Lydia Steier stages Strauss’ opera according to an aesthetic concept by Austrian artist Gottfried Helnwein. Diana Damrau sings the Marschallin. Joana Mallwitz, chief conductor at the Konzerthaus Berlin, conducts the Orchester der Oper Zürich.

Glyndebourne's celebrated production of Nikolaus Lehnhoff's Tristan und Isolde is a supremely intelligent achievement; gravely beautiful, haunting and meditative, it is deeply reflective rather than visceral, fortified by Roland Aeschlimann's stunningly effective set, a womb-like space through which the protagonists move like gods. Conductor Jiří Bělohlávek mirrors Lehnhoff's approach in his sophisticated plumbing of the score's depths, with every shift in texture carefully laid bare by an inspired London Philharmonic Orchestra. Nina Stemme's Isolde and Robert Gambill's Tristan, both gloriously lyrical, are matched by superb performances from René Pape as the betrayed and vulnerable King Marke and Bo Skovhus as Kurwenal, deeply touching in his helpless devotion to Tristan. This High Definition recording of a production of uncommon intimacy reveals the opera's music and drama in a new light.

Renata is obsessed with the love for the 'fiery angel'. Ruprecht, in love with Renata, wants to free her from the madness, but all his efforts are in vain. She goes to the monastery, but here too she is being haunted by the image of the fiery angel. The Inquisition accuses Renata of witchcraft and sentences her to death. Prokofiev's Fiery Angel is one of the outstanding operas of the 20th century. With her production, director Andrea Breth moves the action from 16th century Germany to the sterile environment of a modern psychiatric ward.

Ernst Krenek's theatrical piece Karl V. consisting completely of twelve-tone series should have premiered at the Vienna State Opera. The political situation in the Vienna of 1933 and the fact that Krenek was despised by the Nazis because of this Jazz opera Jonny spielt auf, prevented the première. It only took place five years later in Prague, however Krenek had already emigrated to the USA. Karl V was the last emperor to hold to the idea of a Christian empire in which the sun never set, although its downfall was always inevitable, for numerous reasons. For the second production of Karl V. in the Nationaltheater, Carlus Padrissa in particular seeks out political power systems that are highly topical, and so very precisely analyses the treatment in the theatrical piece. At the core of the intellectually and linguistically highly qualified libretto, written by the composer himself, Karl V. reflects on his life and makes his confession to a young monk below Titian's La Gloria.

More than two centuries after its creation, the emotional pull of this supreme opera remains absolutely intact. Dmitri Tcherniakov duly revisits the myth and makes the seducer of Seville a ‘man without qualities’, a cipher whose words have a hypnotic power over women. His words will disrupt the proprieties ruling the Commandatore’s family. His words are also what makes Don Juan such a subversive figure and the embodiment of one of the most powerful modern European myths. Leading the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra is one of the best Mozart conductors, Louis Langrée. Bo Skovhus portrays a dispirited Don Giovanni, old playboy and anti-hero. Kyle Ketelsen is his servant Leporello, currently a shoe-in for this rôle. The superb female trio is composed of Marlis Petersen (Donna Anna), Kristine Opolais (Elvira) and Kerstin Avemo (Zerlina).

Described by Tchaikovsky as ‘lyric scenes’, Eugene Onegin receives a spectacular reinterpretation from the Norwegian director Stefan Herheim. His productions create controversy and excitement around Europe, and here he takes Pushkin’s story of illusion, disaffection and frustrated love, and places the protagonists – world-weary Onegin and naïve, passionate Tatyana – in a triple temporal perspective, referencing the theatrical present, the period of the work’s composition, and the pageant of Russia’s history. Mariss Jansons, renowned for his mastery of Tchaikovsky’s symphonies, conducts this performance from Amsterdam’s Muziektheater.

Franz Lehár’s “Die Lustige Witwe” is reputed to be one of the most famous operettas in the world. Under the direction of the French Jerome Savary's the “Merry Widow” sparkles. At the first staging of this production at the Opera-Comique in Paris (Octobre, 2005) the singers appeared to be having as much fun as the audience. The Austrian Maestro Manfred Honeck presents his musical view on this operetta.