Paris and Berlin line up Netrebko return
OperaThe Opera de Paris has booked Anna Netrebko and her husband Yusif Eyvazov for Adriana Lecouvreur in January 2024.
The soprano will also appear in recital at the Philharmonie de Paris in October.
Berlin’s Staatsoper has booked her for Verdi’s Macbeth in September.
Its intendant Matthias Schulz says: ‘She has now clearly positioned herself with her actions. As far as it was possible for her, she showed character. I think you have to give the artist this chance. It would be fatal, at this cultural level, to lump everything together.’
So, two fingers all round (although anti-Putin Beczala is no longer smiling with her).
Bravo, Opera de Paris!! Right thing to do!
Hopefully Gergiev will also be unbanned soon.
Music will always prevail above politics and no one will ever change this philosophy for me, ever!
You may well find a number of opera houses taking this position, most likely out of an inability to pay the Russian artists off and hire replacements.
At least opera companies here in the U.S. still have some ethics when it comes to Putin’s propagandists. Ildar Abdrazakov is the latest to lose work here, having just been dropped by the Boston and Chicago orchestras.
Ironic that Europe is actually where the current war is taking place and yet companies there are instead reaching for the quick buck.
Ethics you call it? More like witch hunt. Again. What happened to freedom of conscience? It’s disgusting that one has to make political statements to keep his/her job. It’s about music not elections.
Yes you Russian savage animals are so full of “conscience” in carrying out your endless genocides over the centuries!
Nice last name Phillips, representative of an innocent country.
She did fully exercise her freedom of conscience and chose to support the regime and lavishly benefit for her choice. Your name suggests that you know how things work there. So no one can be mistaken about why her birthday was celebrated in a huge concert bash in the Kremlin Palace, with Putin’s press secretary personally reading Putin’s birthday greetings from the stage, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs lifting covid visa and travel restrictions for her foreign guests during the 2021covid travel bans and the Ministry of Culture working with the Foreign Affairs on the list of guests and whatnot. National press and TV coverage and support came by default. Someone totally neutral and not close at all to the regime and to the dictator would get all of this as a birthday celebration, of course.
It’s the difference between right and wrong. How exactly do you justify thousands of unnecessary deaths and displacements?
O please! America claiming moral higher ground? What a joke…..
Europe does have a history of being its own worst enemy and ignoring pending doom.
She’s still sanctioned in Ukraine. So it will be a fire-dance to invite in the same time a Ukrainian official ensemble or singer’s in official artistic positions and to to put them with Netrebko in one program or a festival.To re-invite her to Berlin is a sign of weakness. Because never ever forget her posing with Donbass-guys, her birthday concert in the Kremlin or her statements pro-Putin. If Otto von Habsburg warned still 2000 again and again before Putin, all Putin close artists could know the danger of this man. Because also a lot of Russian voices warned before Putin and left the country or where exterminated. If you invite her then for a dying audience. With her you build not the future of a leading opera-house in Europe.
And she will sing Elisabeth in Don Carlo at La Scala and Gioconda at the Salzburg Easter Festival…
It’s great she showed character and was therefore hirable. If had kept his mouth shut and just hired her, I would say that the intendant has character, too.
Can someone explain to me how this second rate soprano with vocal issues too numerous to list and her bleating goat xenophobic husband keep getting work in major opera houses? Their questionable politics aside, they are just not good singers. of course, looking at the latest Covent Garden fiasco, the vocal pool must have turned to puddle.