Esa-Pekka Salonen

Strauss: Elektra

Gary Halvorson

Nina Maria Stemme, Waltraud Meier

The great singing actress Nina Stemme gives a heart-wrenching performance in the title role of Strauss’s blazing one-act drama, adapted from the ancient Greek myth. Patrice Chéreau’s acclaimed production—the last staging he worked on before his death in 2013—also stars Waltraud Meier as Klytämnestra, Elektra’s nightmare-haunted mother, Adrianne Pieczonka as Chrysothemis, her sister, and Eric Owens as Orest, their brother, whose return home brings their family story to a terrifying climax. Esa-Pekka Salonen conducts the monumental and highly influential score.

Saariaho: L'Amour de Loin

Peter Sellars

Gerald Finley, Dawn Upshaw

This is the 2004 version of Kaija Saariaho's opera performed by the Finnish National Opera and conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen.

Věc Makropulos

Christoph Marthaler

Angela Denoke, Albert Gregor

The Christoph Marthaler production of Leoš Janáček's "Věc Makropulos", recorded live at the Salzburger Festspiele on 8 & 30 August 2011. Angela Denoke stars as Emilia Marty, with Raymond Very as Albert Gregor, Peter Hoare as Vitek, Jurgita Adamonyté as Krista, and Johan Reuter as Jaroslav Prus. Esa-Pekka Salonen conducts the Wiener Philharmoniker.

Poulenc: La Voix Humaine - Bartók: Le Château de Barbe-Bleue

Stéphane Metge, Stéphane Lissner

John Relyea, Ekaterina Gubanova

Running through Bartók’s disenchanted tale, whose haunting music was initially condemned as unplayable, and the expression of despair in Poulenc’s monologue, the director Krzysztof Warlikowski perceives a shared dramatic thread, a shared feminine consciousness and a shared sense of imprisonment and suffocation: for the woman who penetrates the confines of Bluebeard’s castle and Elle, the woman who clings to a telephone conversation with a man as the only thing worth living for, are condemned to share the same fate. And this man she speaks to, does he really exist? Unless the director has interpreted Cocteau’s words to the letter and the telephone has become a “terrifying weapon that leaves no trace, makes no noise”…

Z mrtvého domu

Willard White, Eric Stoklossa

Condensing the life stories – memories of prison in Silesia – related by Dostoyevsky in his work The House of the Dead, Leoš Janáček composed an opera filled with burning desire and longing. Contagious savagery, cruelty and brutality are exacerbated by the confines of the prison. However, within its concrete walls emerge both tenderness and cruelty at the sight of an injured bird; a multitude of stories and highly personal monologues. With this production, first performed at the Wiener Festwochen in 2007, the Paris Opera pays tribute to Patrice Chéreau.

Universe of Sound - The Planets - Philharmonia Orchestra

Esa-Pekka Salonen, Philharmonia Orchestra

Universe of Sound has won the 2013 Royal Philharmonic Society Award for Audiences and Engagement. The award recognizes an outstanding initiative by an organisation or individual to engage new and existing audiences with classical music in the UK in 2012. The RPS commented "The Philharmonia cements its position as a World leader in the use of digital media" and that the project "provided a thrilling interactive experience for all ages"

Orango

Elina Heiskanen

Esa-Pekka Salonen, Natalia Pavlova

"Orango" - prologue to an unfinished opera by Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975), conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen, performed by the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra and the Mariinsky Theatre Academy. In the 1920s, Soviet biologist Ilya Ivanovich Ivanov carried out a series of experiments to create a human/nonhuman ape hybrid. Three female chimpanzees were inseminated with human sperm. No pregnancy occurred.. In 1929 he organized a set of experiments involving nonhuman ape sperm and human volunteers, but was delayed by the death of his last orangutan.