Poro

GF Handel

Opera in three acts (1731)
Libretto adapted from Pietro Metastasio

Performed in German

This rarely performed opera features a comeback after 15 years! The grand seigneur of realistic musical theatre is back – and he is fulfilling a long-held dream: Harry Kupfer, who made theatre history here in the Behrenstrasse, presents a fundamental conflict of European modernity with Georg Friedrich Handel’s masterful Baroque opera Poro.

Eric sings the role of Alexander the Great.

Cast and Information: https://www.komische-oper-berlin.de/en/whats-on/a-z/poro/

Agrippina

GF Handel

Dramma per musica in three acts (1709)
Libretto by Vincenzo Grimani

Performed in Italian

New Production by Barrie Kosky.

Eric sings the role of Narciso.

In this breathtaking political thriller, Handel’s second composition based on a Nero story and his sixth opera, everything appears at first to be fine on the stage of power: The Roman Emperor Claudius is said to have drowned while returning from his successful campaign against the Britons. His wife Agrippina therefore seizes the moment for Nero, her son from her first marriage, to ascend to the throne. Indeed the librettist Vincenzo Grimani, in ancillary professions also a cardinal and emperor’s ambassador at the Vatican, among other positions, turned his experiences at the court of Pope Clemens XI and his precise knowledge of the Annals of Tacitus and Suetonius’s De vita Caesarum into a libretto that is not only historically precise, but which also twists and turns with the most diverse watershed moments and chicanery surrounding the Vatican throne, so much that, at the end the question here is practically – are there winners, losers and a lieto fine, or happy end, here at all? Director Barrie Kosky sums up: “This opera shows what the best operas are made of – a combination of eroticism and power.”

Cast and Information: https://www.staatsoper.de/en/productioninfo/agrippina.html

Agrippina

GF Handel

Dramma per musica in three acts (1709)
Libretto by Vincenzo Grimani

Performed in Italian

Eric sings the role of Narciso.

Co-production with Bavarian State Opera, Munich, and Dutch National Opera. Agrippina is the ultimate political operator – outrageous and blatant in her pursuit of power. In the title role, Joyce DiDonato heads a specialist cast in Handel’s early operatic success, a calling card when he moved to London. The score boasts a succession of brilliant Baroque jewels – one after another come the bright, sparkling arias, here performed by an international cast, the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, and directed with characteristic invention by Barrie Kosky.

Cast and Information: https://www.roh.org.uk/productions/agrippina-by-barrie-kosky