Sir Simon Rattle conducts the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra and the chorus of the Staatsoper Unter den Linden, Berlin.
The French baroque opera Hippolyte et Aricie transports its audience into a world of wonder with magnificent dance and choral scenes and an astonishing variety of musical forms. Philippe Rameau, a French contemporary of Bach and Handel, revolutionized the music of his time with his radically new, sometimes idiosyncratic harmonies, extraordinarily colourful and complex orchestral writing, different rhythms and high dramatic intensity.
The artist Ólafur Elíasson, who designed the stage sets for the opera Phaedra and the ballet piece Tree of Codes, is responsible for the stage design and costumes. In his art, he deconstructs natural phenomena in order to reinterpret them with the help of color, light, reflections and movement. Elíasson is never concerned with the artwork as a self-contained entity; rather, he seeks to engage in a two-way dialog with the audience.