| Australian Conductor Antony Walker debuts at The Met |
| Monday, 22 March 2010 11:01 |
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New York’s Metropolitan Opera has recently announced that renowned Australian conductor Antony Walker will make his Met debut conducting Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice in the 2010/11 season at the Met. The cast will feature David Daniels as Orfeo, soprano Kate Royal as Euridice, and Lisette Oropesa as Amor. Antony is co-artistic director of Pinchgut Opera, and Music Director of Pittsburgh Opera and Washington Concert Opera. He has conducted a wide range of operatic works from baroque to 19th-century repertory, with such works as John Blow’s Venus and Adonis, Marc-Antoine Charpentier’s David et Jonathas, Handel’s Alcina, Acis and Galatea, Orlando, and Semele, Haydn’s L’anima del filosofo, Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo and Il Ritorno d’Ulisse, Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas and The Fairy Queen, and Rameau’s Dardanus. Several of these have been commercially recorded by ABC Classics with Pinchgut Opera in Sydney. He frequently conducts opera in Australia as well as in the United States and Europe, with his English National Opera debut in February garnering excellent reviews. Antony recent and forthcoming American and UK engagements, have included La bohème, Italian Girl in Algiers, Eugene Onegin, Falstaff, Carmen and Il Barbiere di Siviglia for Pittsburgh Opera, Maria Stuarda for Canadian Opera Company in Toronto, Madama Butterfly for Santa Fe Opera and Lucia di Lammermoor for English National Opera in London. Antony will return to Australia later this year to conduct Pinchgut’s own Orpheus opera - Haydn's L'anima del filosofo: Orpheus & Euridice - at City Recital Hall Angel Place, Sydney opening on Thursday 2 December. Composed in 1791, this work was Haydn's last opera and this is its first Australian production. Haydn's Orpheus is a rarely heard, beautiful, classical opera that was never performed during Haydn's lifetime and its first performance, surprisingly, was in 1951 in Florence with a cast including Maria Callas and Boris Christoff. The 2010 Pinchgut production will include soprano Elena Xanthoudakis in the double part of Euridice/Genio and tenor Andrew Goodwin as Orfeo. |
