An Opera Powerhouse, Munich, Picks Its Next Leaders

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/06/arts/music/bavarian-state-opera-vladimir-jurowski.html

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One of opera’s great recent success stories has been the Bavarian State Opera in Munich, which regularly assembles some of the best casts imaginable for edgy productions that frequently generate more buzz than the offerings of opera houses in bigger world capitals.

Now the company is preparing for a changing of the guard. It announced Tuesday that its next artistic director would be the Belgian impresario Serge Dorny, and its next music director would be Vladimir Jurowski, a Moscow-born conductor who is currently the principal conductor of the London Philharmonic Orchestra. The two men are set to begin in the 2020-21 season.

They have big shoes to fill. The Bavarian State Opera’s current artistic director, Nikolaus Bachler, has had a remarkably successful run, and its current music director, Kirill Petrenko, will become the next chief conductor of one of the most storied ensembles in the world, the Berlin Philharmonic.

And they will have to maintain the prestige of the Munich company, a critical favorite. “No company manages the delicate balance of contemporary opera — simultaneously maintaining high musical standards, attracting the finest singers and experimenting dramatically — better than this one,” Zachary Woolfe wrote in The New York Times in 2015.

Mr. Jurowski, 45, has a reputation as a meticulous and brilliant conductor, both in symphonic repertoire and opera. For more than a decade he was the music director of the Glyndebourne Festival Opera in England, and a 2013 performance of Strauss’s “Die Frau Ohne Schatten” that he led at the Metropolitan Opera was rapturously received.

The career of Mr. Dorny, a modernizing force in opera who worked closely with the late Gerard Mortier, has not been without offstage drama. He was credited with reinvigorating the Opéra de Lyon in France, where he serves as general director — it was lauded as the best opera company last year by the International Opera Awards — but also faced questions there over his expenses and spending habits. And in 2014 he was supposed to become general manager of the Semper Opera in Dresden, Germany — but the deal was canceled months before his start date.

New Yorkers will get a chance to hear the old guard before it leaves Munich, this month in fact: The company is coming to Carnegie Hall on March 29 to give a concert performance of Strauss’s “Der Rosenkavalier,” conducted by Mr. Petrenko.