Mauro Peter

Swiss tenor Mauro Peter is equally at home on the operatic stage and in the recital hall. He began his career singing in the Lucerne Boys Choir. He studied at the Munich University of Music and Theater and the Bavarian Theater Academy, and his teachers included Fenna Kügel-Seifried, August Everding, Christoph Adt, and Helmut Deutsch.

Pentatone presents a new album full of world-premiere recordings of orchestral songs by Hans Sommer, sung by an excellent quartet of soloists – Mojca Erdmann, Anke Vondung, Mauro Peter and Benjamin Appl – together with the Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin under the baton of Guillermo García Calvo. Sommer was a Liszt student whose operas were performed and praised by Richard Strauss, but sunk into relative oblivion due to his unusual career path and independence from major publishers. The songs were discovered recently and can finally be presented to the world. Focusing mostly on Goethe poetry, combining high Romanticism with folk styles, Sommer’s songs are colourfully orchestrated, harmonically audacious, and often highly dramatic and evocative.

David McVicar’s classic production embraces both the seriousness and comedy of Mozart’s work. The audience is transported to a fantastical world of dancing animals, flying machines and dazzlingly starry skies. The setting provides a wonderful backdrop for Mozart’s kaleidoscopic score, from the Queen of the Night’s coloratura fireworks to Tamino and Pamina’s lyrical love duets and Papageno’s hearty, folksong-like arias.

At a time when the majority of German composers turned from the opera to the singspiel, Franz Lachner continued the tradition of the grand historical opera with Catharina Cornaro. The once successful opera, last performed in Munich in 1903, was forgotten for many decades, but a few years ago the editor Volker Tosta of Stuttgart prepared a new edition of this work, its first published version, especially for the concert performance by the Munich Radio Orchestra. The action of the tragic opera is based on the true-life story of the Queen of Cyprus. It is hard to believe that this musically appealing work, which captivated the audience at Munich's Prince Regent Theater already with its highly atmospheric overture during the performance on which this CD is based, ever could be forgotten. Max Zenger's Geschichte der Munchner Oper of 1923 documents the groundbreaking effect of this opera when it states that Catharina Cornaro had "quite literally become Munich's hallmark, like the two towers of the Cathedral of Our Lady."