OPERA
Opera is the supreme discipline of classical music.
A countertenor is a male singer who can sing as high as a soprano or mezzo-soprano. The countertenor is the rarest of all voice types. A Sopranist is a unique type of countertenor voice, it is the "icing on the cake" in opera world.
Historically the castrato voices dominated opera for 300 years. Today, a countertenor is an alternative to the castrato voice.
As the first Austrian countertenor, Arno Raunig began to revive the genre of the rare high male voice in Austria in the 1980s. In addition to opera roles such as Xerxes, Radamisto, Orfeo, Ariodante, Idamante and Sextus, Raunig began a busy concert career with special castrato literature.
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Arno Raunig. Opera
After his opera debut at the Klagenfurt City Theater in 1990 in Henry Purcell’s The Fairy Queen, Arno Raunig sang in productions of the Hamburg State Opera, the Prague Opera (Smetanova divadlo), the Amsterdam Opera, the Semperoper Dresden, the Zurich Opera House, the operas in Rome, Paris and Bonn, the opera in Warsaw (Wielki), the state theaters in Darmstadt and Wiesbaden, the Theater Basel, the Prinzregententheater Munich, the Tyrolean State Theater, the Klagenfurt City Theater, the Hebbeltheater Berlin, the Schönbrunn Palace Theater, the Vienna Chamber Opera and the Jugendstil Theater Vienna.
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World premieres
World premieres, Austrian premieres and contemporary music by Alfred Schnittke (Historia by Dr. Johann Fausten), Jahn Müller-Wieland (The Tale of the 672nd Night – after Hugo von Hofmannsthal), Oskar Strasnoy (Midea 2), Herbert Willi (Sleeping Brother), Pawel Mykietyn (Shakespeare Sonetti), Sir Harrison Birtwistle (The Last Supper), Norbert Zehm (Cadence Macbeth), Wolfram Wagner (Oedipus), Alexander Wagendristl (The Fool – after Edgar Allan Poe), Hans Gefors (The Park – after Botho Strauss), but above all by Helmut Öhring (Documentation, Polaroids, Effi Briest, Requiem, Seven, Bernarda Alba’s House, the Place is Not the Place, Blue Sea and Invisible Land).
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with celebrities
Working with famous personalities such as Nikolaus Harnoncourt, Gerd Albrecht, Peter Eötvös, Jürgen Flimm, John Dew, Harry Kupfer, Ralf Weikert, Frieder Bernius, Hartmut Hänchen, Claus Guth, Julia Jones, Walter Kobera (Neue Oper Wien), Paul Angerer, Joachim Schlömer, Dietrich Hilsdorf and others with ensembles such as Klangforum Wien, Ensemble Modern Frankfurt, Ictus Belgium, Les Menestrels, Concillium Musicum Wien and others.
