ENGAGEMENTS
2025 Season Engagements will be at Theater und Orchester Heidelberg, and Baroque Fest Schwetzingen
Manon Lescaut
September 28th
October 31st
November 2nd, 16th
December 1st, 21st, 25th, 31st
Amber joins the cast in the charming role of The Musician.
Torn between romantic love and a luxurious life, Manon Lescot is steadily drifting towards the edge of an abyss. The home comforts the older and highly esteemed Geronte de Ravoir can offer her compete with the student Renato Des Grieux’s honest love for her. Manon is accused of stealing by Geronte and sent away to America. Even though Des Grieux gets his way and is allowed to accompany her, Manon is unable to build a happy life there.
Eight poets, including the librettist himself and his editor Ricordi, were involved in creating the libretto which is based on Abbé Prévost’s novel from 1731. But despite the sometimes gruelling process, his work paid off: The premiere in Turin in 1893 was a huge success and marked Giacomo Puccini’s long-awaited international break-through as opera composer.
Baroquefest Schwetzingen presents:
Alcibiades
November 28th, 30th
December 4th, 6th, 12th, 14th, 30th
January 12th, 15th, 23rd, 25th
Amber joins the cast singing one of the principle roles, Aspasia.
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Alcibiades was cast out of Athens and incognito, he disappears to Sparta, where Timea, the king of Sparta’s fiancée of all people, falls for his charm. At the same time, Princess Aspasia of Athens is caught by the Spartans but is not recognised thanks to her false identity as a slave. Apart from the king, Lysander, an army general, is also interested in her, while her fiancé Pericles is looking all over Sparta for her. Alcibiades is not averse to her either, leading to a furious confusion full of jealousy, intrigue and great emotions – but the desire for freedom overcomes all conventions.
Originally from Padua, Agostino Steffani is a wanderer between worlds. Ordained as a priest in Rome, his compositions attracted much attention in Germany. Apart from Hannover and Düsseldorf, he briefly stayed in the Palatinate region as Rector of the University of Heidelberg in 1703/04.
Der Rosenkavalier
March 27th
April 6th, 12th, 19th
May 9th, 31st
June 20th
Amber leads the show as the Knight of the Rose, Oktavian.
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Composer Richard Strauss requested a comedy from his librettist Hugo von Hofmannsthal. The comedic opera that premiered in Dresden in 1911 is an oeuvre that plays with confusion, gender trouble, irony and ambiguity, in its text as well as its music, but above all it’s an oeuvre that discusses love, life and transience in a melancholy yet cheery way.
Getting on in years, the married Marschallin Princess Werdenberg feels the passage of time and is trying to find a way to deal with that. Her philosophy is: Be light-hearted, take light-heartedly and let go light-heartedly. While her lover Octavian, still full of illusions, is looking for his place in life, and her cousin, Baron Ochs auf Lerchenau, plans to consolidate his finances by marrying Sophie, the much younger but rich daughter of a bourgeois, the Marschallin pulls the strings between the three of them as she likes.
Così fan tutte
May 22nd, 24th, 28th
June 4th, 7th, 12th, 14th, 23rd, 29th
July 5th
Amber sings leading Lady, Dorabella.
Loyalty or short-lived desire, stability or passion – what is the value of love? As they can’t agree on this question, Alfonso proposes a bet to his younger friends Guglielmo and Ferrando. Both officers believe in their financées’ (Fiordiligi and Dorabella) loyalty, Alfonso wants to prove them wrong. Ferrando and Guglielmo pretend to have been drafted and then come back in disguise to seduce the other’s girl and test their honesty. But can you bet on feelings? What starts out as a game, very quickly takes a dangerous turn.
»Così fan tutte« was created in 1790 as the final opera of Mozart’s Da Ponte trilogy. Yet again, the librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte and composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart use irony to uncover the double standards of love and partnership, though not without taking a nuanced look at their characters’ subjective feelings, the depths of which Mozart’s music in particular knows how to fathom.
