The works of award-winning composer Chaya Czernowin have been performed worldwide at significant new music festivals and prestigious venues, and she is the first woman to be appointed composition professor at Harvard University. Commissioned by Deutsche Oper Berlin and widely acclaimed in the critical press, Heart Chamber uses voice and stage as internalised sonic and visual landscapes to create a genuine multi-sensory musical experience. With only two characters and a hint of a narrative, this is a grand opera on the smallest of transformations, focussing on the intense beauty and vulnerabilities of falling in love.

Heart Chamber is Chaya Czernowin’s Naxos debut, but what a debut! This remarkably powerful production was premiered in November 2019 at the Deutsche Oper Berlin, and went immediately to the top of the critical charts, being named one of the Top 10 Notable Performances of 2019 by Alex Ross of The New Yorker, Best of 2019 with Seen and Heard International and Top of 2019 for Deutschland Radio.

Opera Wire wrote about the production: ‘Heart Chamber spoke directly from the contemporary zeitgeist – our concerns with loneliness, mental health, toxic relationships between men and women – but none of the issues it addressed were exclusively modern… Czernowin’s work was invigorating and refreshing, with its contemporary sensibility and its experimental use of instruments and voices.’

Previous Naxos audiovisual releases from Deutsche Oper Berlin included Zemlinsky’s Der Zwerg (2110657 / NBD0108V), which was nominated in this year’s GRAMMY Awards for Best Opera Performance. The release of Korngold’s Das Wunder der Heliane (211058485 / NBD0083V) won the 2020 Opus Klassik for Best Opera Recording, and a German Record Critic’s Award ‘Quarterly Critic’s Choice’ (2019).

 ‘It is seldom that audiences at the Deutsche Oper Berlin have listened with such rapture to a new commission’ – Online Merker

Bonus feature:
- I Did Not Rehearse to Say I Love You: A feature film by Uli Aumüller

Cast:
- She: Patrizia Ciofi (soprano)
- Her Internal Voice: Noa Frenkel (alto)
- He: Dietrich Henschel (baritone)
- His Internal Voice: Terry Wey (countertenor)
- The Voice: Frauke Aulbert (soprano)
- The Double Bass Player: Uli Fussenegger (double bass)