In May 2025, the Hungarian State Opera will host two world-class performers dedicated to the art of song: on 12 May, German bass Georg Zeppenfeld will perform at the Eiffel Art Studios, and on 28 May, American mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato will take the stage at the Opera House with a personal and intimate programme.
Georg Zeppenfeld, Kammersänger of the Semperoper in Dresden, ultimately chose a career as an opera singer over a path in music and German education, and over the past two and a half decades has become one of the most sought-after basses in the German and Italian repertoire. He is a regular guest of the Bayreuth Festival and the world’s leading opera houses, from San Francisco and New York to London, Munich, and Vienna, performing in roles by Mozart, Wagner, and Verdi.
At the 12 May performance of the Stars' Recitals with Piano series, Zeppenfeld will present a selection of songs by two giants of German Romanticism, Schubert and Brahms. The programme will focus on humanity’s great themes – life and death, love and solitude – while showcasing the unique colour and expressive power of the bass voice. In addition to Schubert's well-known songs such as Ständchen (Serenade), Der Doppelgänger (The Double), and Prometheus, the audience will also hear Brahms’s Five Songs for Low Voice and Piano and the cycle Four Serious Songs. He will be joined by pianist Gerold Huber, one of the most sought-after specialists of the song genre and a prominent figure in the international concert scene.
The Stars' Recitals with Piano series will conclude on 28 May with a performance by Joyce DiDonato, well-known to Hungarian audiences. Like Zeppenfeld, she traded her ambitions as a music teacher for an extraordinary singing career. The three-time Grammy-winning American coloratura mezzo-soprano has been one of the most in-demand interpreters of Baroque, Romantic, and contemporary music in the world’s leading opera houses and concert halls for the past 25 years.
DiDonato’s first appearance at the Hungarian State Opera will be part of her European recital tour in May, which begins mid-month at La Scala in Milan. Her programme, spanning more than two centuries and focusing on female destinies, opens with impressionist works – Debussy’s sensuous Songs of Bilitis and Alma Mahler’s rarely heard Five Songs. The second half features Haydn’s cantata Ariadne auf Naxos, followed by Camille Claudel: Into the Fire, a song cycle by contemporary American composer Jake Heggie –also known in Hungary for his opera Dead Man Walking – inspired by the brilliant sculptor and former muse of Rodin, who was confined to a psychiatric institution. She will be accompanied on piano by fellow Grammy-winner Craig Terry, conductor and music director of the Lyric Opera of Chicago’s training programme, who has collaborated with DiDonato for over a decade in recordings and performances.
Both Georg Zeppenfeld and Joyce DiDonato are devoted advocates of the song and aria recital genre. Like the previous performers of the Stars' Recitals with Piano series, they step off the grand opera stages to present a deeply intimate, personal, and revealing form of performance at the highest artistic level.
