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Matthias Goerne is one of the most internationally sought-after vocalists and a frequent guest at renowned festivals and concert halls. He has collaborated with the world’s leading orchestras, conductors and pianists.
Born in Weimar, he studied with Hans-Joachim Beyer in Leipzig, and later with Elisabeth Schwarzkopf and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau. Goerne has appeared on the world’s principal opera stages, including the Royal Opera House, the Teatro Real, the Paris National Opera, Vienna Staatsoper, and the Metropolitan Opera.
Goerne made his début as Wotan in a concert version of Das Rheingold with the HK Phil under Jaap van Zweden in 2015.
Mezzo-soprano Michelle DeYoung appears regularly with the New York Philharmonic, Boston Symphony Orchestra, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Cleveland Orchestra, San Francisco Symphony, Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, London Symphony Orchestra, Vienna Philharmonic, the Concertgebouworkest, and the Sydney Symphony. She has also performed at the prestigious festivals of Ravinia, Tanglewood, Saito Kinen, Edinburgh and Lucerne. Equally at home on the opera stage, Ms DeYoung has appeared with The Metropolitan Opera, Lyric Opera of Chicago, Teatro alla Scala, Bayreuth Festival, Berliner Staatsoper and the Paris Opera.
A multi-GRAMMY Award-winning recording artist, DeYoung’s impressive discography includes Das Rheingold, Die Walküre and Götterdämmerung with Jaap van Zweden and the Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra (Naxos), Les Troyens with Sir Colin Davis and the London Symphony Orchestra (LSO Live!), and various Mahler works with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, San Francisco Symphony, and the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra. Her most recent recording of Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde with the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra (Deutsche Grammophon) was released in July 2021 and she is a featured soloist in the Met Opera’s Verdi’s Requiem: The Met Remembers 9/11 which was nominated for a 2023 GRAMMY Award for Best Choral Performance.
Michelle DeYoung is the founder of Ensemble Charité, an organisation which aims to support various charities while also fostering young, emerging musicians through community performances of chamber concerts with seasoned professional musicians, conducted by DeYoung. She was also recently named to the vocal faculty of the Jacob School of Music at Indiana University, Bloomington (USA).
Stuart Skelton, distinguished as a Heldentenor, has a repertoire encompassing many of opera’s most challenging rôles, from Wagner’s Lohengrin, Parsifal, Siegmund and Tristan to Strauss’s Kaiser, Beethoven’s Florestan, Saint-Saëns’ Samson, Dvořák’s Dimitrij and Britten’s Peter Grimes.
He appears regularly at the Metropolitan Opera, Royal Opera House, English National Opera, Opéra national de Paris and Festspielhaus Baden-Baden under the batons of James Levine, Philippe Jordan, Donald Runnicles, Simone Young, Edward Gardner, Asher Fisch, Valery Gergiev and Daniele Gatti, among others.
His symphonic diary includes a broad range of concert work ranging from Beethoven and Mahler to Janáček and Stravinsky.
Heidi Melton has been described as “the Wagnerian voice we have been waiting for since Flagstad and Nilsson”, and has sung the rôle of Sieglinde at the Deutsche Opera, the Palau de les Arts Reina Sofía in Valencia and at the Canadian Opera Company.
She has sung Brünnhilde in concert with Opéra National de Bordeaux and the Third Norn in the Metropolitan Opera production of Der Ring des Nibelungen under Fabio Luisi. She made her début at the BBC Proms as Elisabeth in a concert performance of Tannhäuser with Donald Runnicles and the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra.
The Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra (HK Phil) is regarded as one of the leading orchestras in Asia. The orchestra turned professional in 1974, and is celebrating its 50th anniversary with Joshua Bell, Seong-Jin Cho, Paavo Järvi, Yo-Yo Ma, Lang Lang, Tarmo Peltokoski and Vasily Petrenko during the 2023/24 season.
The orchestra collaborates with internationally renowned conductors and soloists, annually presenting more than 150 concerts which attract over 200,000 music lovers. The HK Phil promotes the work of Hong Kong and Chinese composers, commissions new works, nurtures local talent and runs extensive education and community programmes.
The HK Phil has toured Europe, Asia, Australia and extensively across Mainland China with music director Jaap van Zweden. Yu Long has been principal guest conductor since the 2015/16 season, and Lio Kuokman was appointed resident conductor in December 2020.
In 2019 the HK Phil won the prestigious Gramophone magazine Orchestra of the Year Award – the first orchestra in Asia to receive this accolade.
The HK Phil is financially supported by the Government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region.
Jaap van Zweden began his tenure as music director of the Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra in 2012. He has also served as music director of the New York Philharmonic since 2018. He has conducted orchestras on three continents, appearing as a guest with the Orchestre de Paris, Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, Gewandhausorchester Leipzig, Wiener Philharmoniker, Berliner Philharmoniker and London Symphony Orchestra in Europe, and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, The Cleveland Orchestra and Los Angeles Philharmonic in the United States.
Among his numerous recordings is the 2020 release of the world premiere of David Lang’s prisoner of the state, which followed the 2019 release of Julia Wolfe’s GRAMMY-nominated Fire in my mouth, both recorded with the New York Philharmonic and released on Decca Gold. In 2018 he completed a four-year project conducting Wagner’s Ring cycle with the HK Phil, which was released on Naxos. His acclaimed performance of Parsifal (Challenge Classics) earned him the prestigious Edison Award for Best Opera Recording in 2012.
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Wagner was a remarkable innovator in both the harmony and structure of his work, stressing his own concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk, the ‘total work of art’, in which all the arts were brought together into a single unity. He was prepared to sacrifice his family and friends in the cause of his own music, and his overt anti-Semitism has attracted unwelcome attention to ideas that are remote from his real work as a musician. In the later part of his career Wagner enjoyed the support of King Ludwig II of Bavaria and was finally able to establish his own theatre and festival at the Bavarian town of Bayreuth. He developed the use of the leitmotif (in German Leitmotiv – ‘leading motif’) as a principle of musical unity, his dramatic musical structure depending on the interweaving of melodies or fragments of melody associated with characters, incidents or ideas in the drama. His prelude to the love tragedy Tristan und Isolde led to a new world of harmony.
Operas and Music Dramas
Wagner won his first operatic success in Dresden with the opera Rienzi, based on a novel by Edward Bulwer-Lytton. This was followed a year later, in 1843, by Der fliegende Holländer (‘The Flying Dutchman’), derived from a legend recounted by Heine of the Dutchman fated to sail the seas until redeemed by true love. Tannhäuser, dealing with the medieval Minnesinger of that name, was staged in Dresden in 1845. Wagner’s involvement in the revolution of 1848 and subsequent escape from Dresden led to the staging of his next dramatic work, Lohengrin, in Weimar, under the supervision of Liszt. The tetralogy The Ring—its four operas Das Rheingold, Die Walküre (‘The Valkyrie’), Siegfried and Götterdämmerung (‘The Twilight of the Gods’)—is a monument of dramatic and musical achievement that occupied the composer for a number of years. Other music dramas by Wagner include Tristan und Isolde, Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (‘The Mastersingers of Nuremberg’), and his final work, Parsifal.
Orchestral Music
The best known of Wagner’s orchestral compositions is the Siegfried Idyll, an aubade written for the composer’s second wife, Cosima (illegitimate daughter of Liszt and former wife of Wagner’s friend and supporter Hans von Bülow). His early works also include a symphony.
Songs
At the root of Wagner’s drama of forbidden love, Tristan und Isolde, was his own affair with Mathilde Wesendonck, wife of a banker upon whose support he relied during years of exile in Switzerland. The five Wesendonck-Lieder are settings of verses by Mathilde Wesendonck.
