René Jacobs’s 30th Anniversary at the Staatsoper Unter den Linden

René Jacobs is celebrating his 30th anniversary at the Staatsoper Unter den Linden this year. From 1992 to the present day, the baroque specialist has directed a total of 26 opera productions and a number of concerts. The number of performances he has conducted at the State Opera (or on guest tours) totals over 220.

In 1992 Jacobs accepted the invitation of then-director Georg Quander and made his debut on October 4th with Carl Heinrich Graun's opera CLEOPATRA E CESARE, on the occasion of the 250th anniversary of the opening of the opera house Unter den Linden with this same work. Since then he has made regular guest appearances as an opera and concert conductor and brought leading early music ensembles to the State Opera, such as Concerto Köln, Concerto Vocale, the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra, the B'Rock Orchestra and the Academy for Early Music Berlin, with whom he had a particularly close working relationship. The spectrum ranged from Monteverdi to Mozart, with well-known works from the Baroque and early Classic periods as well as new discoveries and rarely played pieces that were also well received by the public and the press. The Italian repertoire (Cavalieri, Cavalli, Scarlatti, Steffani, Handel, Hasse, Traetta) played a role in this, as well as the German (Keiser and Telemann) and the English (Purcell and again Handel), for which he always used his great knowledge of style in an original and creative access to the material and the music. This year, for the 30th anniversary, he returned to the Staatsoper with the new production of Antonio Vivaldi's opera IL GIUSTINO and the Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin, thus staging an opera by Vivaldi for the first time in the history of the house.