"Bad Orb Opera Academy" Bad Orb Things to Do Tip by Nemorino

The Opera Academy in Bad Orb is intended as a showcase for young singers at the beginning of their careers. Every year fifty to sixty young singers come to auditions, and those who are chosen get the opportunity to rehearse and perform an opera in Bad Orb under the direction of retired opera singer Carlos Krause.

Krause does the staging himself, and his productions are unabashedly conventional. He says young singers should have the opportunity to be in an old-fashioned no-frills production at least once in their lives, since they will be in modern productions often enough if they start singing on the stages of German opera houses.

Though the singers are young professionals, the orchestra and chorus are recruited locally, which guarantees that all the local residents will be interested in what is going on, since everybody you meet in Bad Orb seems to have a sister-in-law or somebody who is in the chorus.

They generally only do two performances a year, on a Friday and a Sunday in August, but as these are nearly always sold out they have started opening up the dress rehearsals to the local people so they can see their friends and relatives on stage. The performances are all in German.

In 2004 the regional television station Hessenfernsehen did daily reports from Bad Orb the entire week before the premiere, in the form of a tongue-in-cheek "soap opera" about the rehearsals for Tiefland. They were also there to film a report on the premiere itself, as seen in the photo.

Phone: (06052) 8326
Website: http://www.opernakademie.com/