Sara Jakubiak (Arabella), Russell Braun (Mandryka), Elena Tsallagova (Zdenka), Doris Soffel (Adelaide), Robert Watson (Matteo), Albert Pesendorfer (Count Waldner), Orchestra and Chorus of the Deutsche Oper Berlin, Tobias Kratzer, Sir Donald Runnicles

Richard Strauss’s Arabella is a lyric comedy that portrays hardships and obsessions in a society whose late-bourgeois values are crumbling. An addiction to gambling has driven the family of cavalry officer Waldner into financial ruin, and their only hope for salvation lies in marrying off their daughter Arabella into a wealthy family. Strauss’s orchestral opulence coupled with its period Viennese setting has seen Arabella perceived as a light-hearted comedy of errors, but Tobias Kratzer’s multi-faceted production also explores the disunity between its characters, spotlighting tensions that connect 19th-century Vienna to the present day.

Tobias Kratzer won a number of special prizes in 2008 including First Prize at the International Ring Award Competition in Graz. Since then, he has directed numerous productions including Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg and Götterdämmerung (Bremen, Weimar and Karlsruhe) nominated for Best Production of the Year on several occasions, and his production of The Csárdás Princess (Kálmán) received a nomination for The Austrian prize for musical theatre. In 2018, Die Deutsche Bühne named him Director of the Year and he also won the Faust Prize for Best Opera Director for his production of Götterdämmerung in Karlsruhe. In 2020, the international magazine Opernwelt named him Director of the Year, and his production of Tannhäuser Production of the Year.

Conductor Sir Donald Runnicles is the General Music Director of the Deutsche Oper Berlin and Music Director of the Grand Teton Music Festival (Jackson, Wyoming), as well as the Principal Guest Conductor of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra. He was recently named Conductor Emeritus of the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, having served as its Chief Conductor from 2009 to 2016. Maestro Runnicles enjoys close and enduring relationships with several of the most significant opera companies and orchestras, and is especially celebrated for his interpretations of Romantic and post-Romantic symphonic and opera repertoire which are core to his musical identity.