As part of his tenure at Liverpool Philharmonic, Chief Conductor Domingo Hindoyan has promised to present an opera every season.
And what more dramatic way to begin than with a performance of Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle right here on stage at the Hall?
You can learn more about what to expect in our programme notes, which this year are being presented in a new and accessible way.
Watch Stephen Johnson talking about the concert programme here
In addition, this companion page draws together a range of complementary content that we hope will help shine further light on the pieces, the people who composed them and the performers bringing them to life here in Hope Street.
Domingo Hindoyan
Domingo Hindoyan was born in Caracas in 1980 to a violinist father and a lawyer mother. He started his musical career as a violinist in the ground-breaking Venezuelan music education programme, El Sistema.
He studied conducting at Haute école de musique in Geneva , where he gained his masters, and in 2012 was invited to join the Allianz International Conductor’s Academy, through which he worked with the London Philharmonic and the Philharmonia Orchestra, and with conductors like Esa-Pekka Salonen and Sir Andrew Davis.
He was appointed first assistant conductor to Daniel Barenboim at the Deutsche Staatsoper Berlin in 2013 and in 2019, he took up a position as principal guest conductor of the Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra.
In the same year, he made his debut with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra and was appointed as successor to Vasily Petrenko in 2020, taking up this position last September.
Adrienn Miksch
Soprano Adrienn Miksch makes her Liverpool debut as Judith, just days after playing this role in her native Hungary.
Having studied under Erika Sziklay and Emese Virág to gain a masters in Singing and Teaching from the Liszt Ferenc Academy of Music, she later went on to be accepted into the Opera Studio of the Hungarian State Opera.
Miksch has appeared in concert all over the world, singing in performances in Tokyo, Milan, Hanover, Toronto and at Carnegie Hall, to name a few. She was Grand Prize Winner of the 16th IBLA International Music Competition in New York, came second in the world-famous Monte Carlo Voice Masters in 2008, and was winner of the Renata Tebaldi International Voice Competition.
Her previous roles include the Countess in The Marriage of Figaro, Chrysothemis in Elektra and Mary Lynch Follet in William Mayer’s A Death in the Family (2012 winner at the Armel Festival and Competition).
Károly Szemerédy
Hungarian Károly Szemerédy makes his British debut in this performance of fellow countryman Béla Bartók’s opera, sung in Hungarian with English surtitles.
The bass-baritone began his studies at the Hungarian State Opera as a student of Margit László and continued at the Escuela Superior de Canto de Madrid.
He made his debut at the Teatro Real in Madrid in 2007, playing Levitsky in Boris Gudanov.
In 2008, he won the Maestro Guerrero International Singing Competition in Madrid, later reaching the finals of the Hans Gabor Belvedere Singing Competition in Vienna. In 2013, he won the Opera-Città di Mondovi award for breakthrough young talent of the year.
His roles include William Tell, Count Almavira, Escamillo in Carmen and Leonardo in Szokolay’s Blood Wedding.
He has previously performed Bluebeard’s Castle at the Amsterdam Concertgebouw, with the Orchestra of the Municipal Theatre of Bologna and with Opera Lyon.
Gustav Mahler
The Curse of the Ninth (()) – the idea that a composer is fated to die while or after composing their ninth symphony – remains one of the best-known superstitions in classical music.
Of course, many have proved it’s just that, a superstition. Shostakovich produced 15 symphonies, Mozart left almost 50 and Haydn? Haydn completed a record-breaking 106.
But still the superstition persists, fuelled by the examples of Beethoven, Bruckner, Schubert, Dvořák, Vaughan Williams… and Mahler.
It was Gustav Mahler who might actually have given the superstition oxygen. He reportedly became obsessed with the idea, which then, in turn, ironically became a self-fulfilling prophesy when the Austrian died while in the middle of composing his 10th Symphony.
Did you know? Mahler liked to compose in the morning and then spend the rest of his day swimming, running or cycling.
Listen to the Adagio from Mahler’s 10th Symphony.
Béla Bartók
Composer and pianist Béla Bartók was born in Nagyszentmiklós – now Sânnicolau Mare in northwest Romania – in 1881.
A sickly child, he showed musical promise at an early age. At five years old, he could already play 40 pieces on the piano, and he gave his first public recital at 11.
While he was studying at the Royal Academy of Music in Budapest, the young Bartók met fellow composer Zoltán Kodály, who became a lifelong friend.
Liszt, Richard Strauss and Brahms, and later Debussy, Stravinsky and Schoenberg all influenced his style – as of course did the folk music he encountered and recorded (on an Edison phonograph) as he travelled through his native Hungary.
Bartók was 30 when he embarked on composing what would turn out to be his only opera, Bluebeard’s Castle.
It had a libretto by Hungarian writer, poet and film critic Béla Balázs, who had originally conceived it for Kodály.
Did you know? In March 1922, Bartók gave a recital at the Rushworth Hall in Liverpool where, as one critic recalled, “his shy and modest personality charmed everyone, just as his strong and wilful music surprised us all.”
Listen to a performance of Bluebeard’s Castle.