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Sechs Freunde für Figaro - Deutsche Oper Berlin

What moves us

Six friends for Figaro

All of the main roles in LE NOZZE DI FIGARO have been cast from the ensemble. Here singers describe the experience of treading the boards alongside friends

 

 

Meechot Marrero

[a member of the ensemble since 2017] sings Cherubino

 

In the early stages my world was reduced to my apartment and the rehearsal rooms. So many new roles, so little time! I got a lot of help from my colleagues. I don’t know what I would’ve done without Thomas Lehman – and I’m not the only one. Anyway, sooner or later it calms down and now and then I sing at other venues. Which is what makes it even more of a pleasure to be back rehearsing with the ensemble for FIGARO. Some things you can only pick up here: for example, there’s only one place where you get to see Burkhard Ulrich painstakingly rehearsing a simple stage direction.

 

 

Burkhard Ulrich

[since 2001] sings Don Basilio

 

 

FIGARO was my first opera here, over 20 years ago. Since then I’ve sung many parts, as guest too, but I never wanted to cut my links with the ensemble. Rehearsals are simply more intense here. And FIGARO is a case in point: you can instantly tell if the singers are really on the same wavelength or if they’re just delivering their individual performances. The acting is important to me; musical perfection without good acting leaves me cold. You need empathy on stage, and that comes from a sympathy within the group: for instance, has X forgotten his lines or is he pausing for dramatic effect? Ensemble for me means working on nuances and enjoying listening to people.

 

 

 

Padraic Rowan

[since 2019] sings Bartolo

 

Looking back on my four years in the ensemble, I can truly say that a performance is so much more enjoyable when you know the people you’re working with. It’s really nice looking at familiar faces across the stage. And it’s totally ok if the guy is playing my son one day and my mortal enemy the next. In fact it’s better that way, because we keep seeing new facets of each other’s character, musically and as a human being. 

 

 

Thomas Lehman

[since 2014] sings Count Almaviva

 

 

I had it easy because our language of communication in the ensemble is English, my mother tongue. My feeling at home, though, was all due to the people, singers like Seth Carico, who took me under his wing and helped me settle in. It means a lot to me to be standing on stage with my friends, especially in a comic opera. Count Almaviva has a lot of slapstick scenes with Cherubino, his page, sung by Meechot Marrero. Because we know each other so well, there’s an ease and naturalness to the way we play it, and I think audiences pick up on that.

 

 

 

Maria Motolygina

[since 2022] sings Countess Almaviva

 

For me the ensemble is a mixture of family and masterclass. You might assume that we’re kind of competing with each other, but I’m happy to say that that’s not been my experience. From the start, everyone’s given me great tips on my various roles – and it’s the same with me now. There are no secret tricks that you should be keeping to yourself. Each singer is unique anyway – and that’s just one of the many things I’ve learnt from working as part of the ensemble.

 

 

Lilit Davtyan

[since 2023] sings Susanna

 

 

Quite recently, a year ago, I was singing Barbarina at the Bolshoi. I saw the role of Susanna and thought, wow, what a great part, what a great woman – clever, plucky, attractive, cool. And now here I am, playing her on the main stage. It’s still hard to get my head around. Everything’s still very new: country, language, people, parts to play. I was really floundering at first, but now I’m just grateful to be allowed to be here, to be getting to know all my fellow singers, many of them for the first time on this FIGARO production.

 

 

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21
DEC

Advents-Verlosung: Das 21. Fensterchen

On 12 April 2025, we will celebrate the revival of DIE MEISTERSINGER VON NÜRNBERG in the production by Jossi Wieler, Sergio Morabito and Anna Viebrock, with Thomas Johannes Mayer as Hans Sachs, Elena Tsallagova as Eva, Magnus Vigilius as Walther von Stolzing and Chance Jonas-O'Toole as David, as part of our ‘Richard Wagner in April’ weeks. But today, we are giving away our DVD, which was recorded in collaboration with the NAXOS label in the premiere series in early summer 2022.

In today's Advent calendar window, we are giving away 2 DVDs of DIE MEISTERSINGER VON NÜRNBERG – Opera in three acts by Richard Wagner. If you would like to win one of the two DVDs, please write an e-mail with the subject ‘The 21st window’ to advent@deutscheoperberlin.de.

More popular than almost any other stage work by Richard Wagner, DIE MEISTERSINGER VON NÜRNBERG is loved and hated at the same time. The play combines a light-hearted comedy plot with a summer night's drunken play about the delusion and reality of love, but at the same time claims to be a founding manifesto of German national art and is therefore more historically charged in its reception than almost any other work by Richard Wagner. At the same time, however, DIE MEISTERSINGER is first and foremost a piece about music and music-making.

Telling the story of DIE MEISTERSINGER in a world dedicated to music is also the starting point for the directorial concept of Jossi Wieler, Anna Viebrock and Sergio Morabito. In it, they tell of the rules and rigid dogmas that govern this world and which thus become an example for numerous contexts in which people set rules, subordinate themselves and find refuge in them or want to break out and escape. They bring a play to the stage in which singers also play singers in order to tell a story about singing. And they show characters such as Hans Sachs, an ageing man who renounces his love for Eva in favour of a younger man and at the same time wants to reform the system, but does not shy away from demagoguery and populism - while the breath of history occasionally blows in the ghosts of the Meistersinger past.

Conductor John Fiore; Staging Jossi Wieler, Anna Viebrock, Sergio Morabito; With Johan Reuter, Albert Pesendorfer, Gideon Poppe, Simon Pauly, Philipp Jekal, Thomas Lehman, Jörg Schörner, Clemens Bieber, Burkhard Ulrich, Stephen Bronk, Tobias Kehrer, Byung Gil Kim, Klaus Florian Vogt, Ya-Chung Huang, Heidi Stober, Annika Schlicht a. o.; Chorus and Orchestra of the Deutsche Oper Berlin



Closing date: 21 December 2024, the winners will be informed by email on 23 December 2024. The DVDs will then be sent by post. Legal recourse is excluded.