The Don Giovanni production with the MCO is the centrepiece of this year’s Summer Festival at the Festspielhaus Baden-Baden. With a high-profile cast of singers (including Diana Damrau, Rolando Villazón and Mojca Erdmann), the opera will be performed in a concert version on three evenings and recorded by Deutsche Grammophon for a CD production. The MCO can also be heard in Baden-Baden in two further concerts of works by Mozart. In the first, the last three Mozart symphonies will be performed, and the second features three piano concertos with Pierre-Laurent Aimard.
Berlin, 14 July 2011 – The MCO has set new standards with many operas, often under the direction of its founder Claudio Abbado (Simon Boccanegra, Die Zauberflöte, Fidelio) or with its Principal Conductor Daniel Harding (The Turn of the Screw, Così fan tutte, Wozzeck), but also with guest conductors such as Tugan Sokhiev (The Love of Three Oranges), Pierre Boulez (From the House of the Dead) or Daniele Gatti (Lulu). Mozart’s Don Giovanni is the piece with which it made opera history as it presented itself to an international audience as the orchestra of the Aix-en-Provence Festival only a few months after its founding in summer 1998. Under the direction of Claudio Abbado and his then 22 year-old assistant Daniel Harding, the orchestra made its international breakthrough in one fell swoop: during the following two and a half years, the production (directed by Peter Brook) toured throughout Europe and Asia and attracted a world-wide cult following.
The MCO has performed Don Giovanni 55 times to date, and now the work comes to the Festspielhaus Baden-Baden in a concert version under the direction of young Canadian conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin and with a star cast of singers. The production, with Ildebrando D’Arcangelo in the title role of Don Giovanni, Diana Damrau as Donna Anna, Joyce DiDonato as Donna Elvira, Mojca Erdmann as Zerlina, Rolando Villazón as Don Ottavio, Vitalij Kowaljow as Il Commendatore and Luca Pisaroni as Leporello, will be recorded by Deutsche Grammophon and is the centrepiece of the Baden-Baden Summer Festival, which focuses on works by Mozart this year. The three performances will take place on 18, 21 and 24 July.
On 20 July, the MCO perform with the last three Mozart symphonies K. 543, 550 and 551 (“Jupiter”), also under the baton of Yannick Nézet-Séguin, and on 23 July Mozart’s Piano Concertos K. 466, 467 and 595 are on the programme with French pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard leading the orchestra from the piano. The MCO and Pierre-Laurent Aimard share an artistic partnership that has lasted several years. Most recently, he invited the orchestra to play at the Aldeburgh Festival in 2009 shortly after his appointment as artistic director there. Aimard is at home in contemporary as well as classical repertoire. His recordings of Piano Concertos nos. 17 and 18 received the MIDEM classical music prize. He is considered one of the most intelligent and precise interpreters of Mozart.
