This website uses cookies so that we can provide you with the best user experience possible. Cookie information is stored in your browser and performs functions such as recognising you when you return to our website and helping our team to understand which sections of the website you find most interesting and useful.
Max Emanuel Cencic
Biography
“Blessed with the finest countertenor voice of our day” (Opernwelt), Max Emanuel Cencic has a reputation as a dramatic and virtuoso performer that is second to none. Most unusually for a singer, as Artistic Director of Parnassus Arts Productions since 2001, he has also been responsible for the conception, production and oversight of long-unheard masterpieces of baroque opera seria. In an operatic form that, more than any other, has the voice as its fulcrum, his combination of meticulous research with the ability to assemble performers of unsurpassed ability in this remarkably demanding field has been recognised with numerous awards, including two Echo Klassik prizes and two Grammy nominations.
It was, therefore, perhaps inevitable that Cencic would also bring the role of stage director within his artistic orbit. True to his adventurous spirit, he chose to do this with an almost unknown opera, Siroe, by one of the finest exponents of opera seria, Johann Adolf Hasse, in his day a composer of unparallelled renown throughout Europe, and one whom Cencic regards as the fourth “great” of the German baroque, alongside Bach, Handel and Telemann. Wishing to distance himself from the “cold stages” and “Freudian interpretations” that litter today’s opera houses, he created an exotic “Thousand and One Nights” world of light and colour in which to explore the typically complex relationships of the drama, written by the most famous of all eighteenth-century librettists, Metastasio. Critical reaction to the performances in Versailles, Budapest and Athens was thoroughly enthusiastic: “a deluge of virtuosity and colour”, a “triumphant success”, “a spectacle as inviting as it was sensitive”, “work of unbelievable quality”.
Visual material concerning the production Siroe is available here:
Siroe: O placido il mare lunsinghi la sponda
—-
Another production with Max Emanuel Cencic as Stage Director and protagonist is Handel’s Arminio, premiered at the Badische Staatstheater Karlsruhe in February 2016. Set in a Germanic half-world on the borders of the Roman empire, this promises spectacle and intrigue of an altogether different nature.
A video excerpt from Arminio can be seen here.
—-
Arte TV offered a live recording of the whole opera La Donna del Lago (Opera de Lausanne). (expired)
Reviews:
Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 20 april 2018
Luzerner Zeitung, 23 april 2018
Reviews of SERSE @ Badisches Staatstheater Karlsruhe
———————————————————————————–
Staged performances of Arminio directed by Max Emanuel Cencic:
February 13 – 23, 2016: Badisches Staatstheater, Karlsruhe (DE), 6 performances
February 24 – March 1, 2017: Badisches Staatstheater, Karlsruhe (DE), 3 performances
———————————————————————————–
Staged and semi-staged performances of Siroe directed by Max Emanuel Cencic:
June 26 and 27, 2014: Athens Festival, Athens (GR), 2 performances
November 26 -30, 2014: Opera royal, Versailles (FR), 3 performances
April 18, 2015: Vigszinhaz, Budapest (HU), 1 performance semi-staged
November 9 – 11, 2016: Opera de Lausanne (CH), 2 performances semi-staged
May 20 – 22, 2017: Hessisches Staatstheater Wiesbaden (DE), 2 performances
May 18, 2018: Markgräfliches Opernhaus Bayreuth (DE), 1 performance semi-staged
———————————————————————————–
Staged performances of La Donna del Lago directed by Max Emanuel Cencic:
April 22, 25, 27 and 29, 2018: Opera de Lausanne, Lausanne (CH)
April 12, 15, 17, 19, 23 and 25, 2019: Hrvatsko Narodno Kazaliste u Zagrebu, Zagreb (HR)
LessLessLess
Read MoreRead MoreRead More