NCPA festival to stage 26 opera shows this year
Richard Wagner’s only comic opera, Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg — a coproduction of China’s National Center for the Performing Arts, the Royal Opera House and Convent Garden from London and Opera Australia — will headline the NCPA Opera Festival.
The opera will be staged in Beijing from May 31 to June 7.
The joint production is directed by Kasper Holten and choreographed by Signe Fabricius. It will feature the NCPA Orchestra and NCPA Chorus under the baton of Chinese conductor Lyu Jia.
Composed between 1845 and 1867 and first staged at the National Theatre Munich in 1868, Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg is based on the life of German poet and composer Hans Sachs. The opera also helped to reflect Wagner’s reforming of German arts.
According to Lyu, Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg is the fifth Wagner operatic production by the National Center for the Performing Arts. It’s the second opera to be produced by the NCPA in collaboration with the Royal Opera House. Italian composer Umberto Giordano’s Andrea Chenier, which was staged in 2015, was the first.
Lyu, who is also the opera director of the NCPA and principal conductor of the in-house orchestra, notes that in its 10th year, the NCPA Opera Festival, which will be held from April 13 to July 26, will showcase 26 performances of nine opera productions, mostly from China.
From July 18 to 22, the NCPA will premier its new production of the five-act French romantic opera, Romeo et Juliette, by French composer Charles-François Gounod to celebrate the 200th anniversary of his birth.
“There is a growing energy around opera as an art form despite the fact that it was imported to China from the West. Since the opening of the NCPA in 2007, we have been devoted to promoting opera among Chinese audiences and producing original operas as well as Western classics,” says Lyu, adding that the NCPA has produced about 60 operas.
The NCPA’s original opera production, The Dawns Here Are Quiet, will open this year’s opera festival. It debuted at the NCPA in 2015. The opera, composed by Tang Jianping, with libretto by Wan Fang, is based on Russian writer Boris Vasilyev’s novel of the same title. It tells the story of five female soldiers fighting German troops during World War II.
Lyu Jia,
The opera was staged on the 70th anniversary of the end of the war, and it has been presented at the NCPA around five times. A film related to the opera will be shown at the upcoming festival, with the aim of further popularizing opera in China.
Besides the operas produced by the NCPA, four Chinese opera companies will stage their productions during the festival, including the China National Opera House’s Manas, which is based on the Kyrgyz epic Manas, a folk masterpiece; the Ningbo Performing Arts Group’s Tu Youyou, based on the story of Tu Youyou, the Chinese Nobel laureate in medicine; The China Opera and Dance Drama Theatre’s Liu Sanjie, which is about a folk singer of the Zhuang ethnic group; and the Hubei Opera and Dance Drama Theater’s historical piece, King Zhuang of Kingdom Chu.
Apart from the performances at the NCPA, 11 opera films will be screened at universities in Beijing and NCPA opera consultant Giuseppe Cuccia will give lectures.