Coliseum; Barbican; Linbury Studio; Queen Elizabeth Hall, all London
Based on column inches and lurid images alone, never mind the incalculable online torrent, the big event this week was Berlioz's The Damnation of Faust at English National Opera. After squawks over the company's recent choice of directors from outside opera, it was a pleasure to witness a superbly staged, ingenious production from opera novice Terry Gilliam, best known as a Hollywood director and genius ex-Python animator. If you want to use film in opera, and most now do, Gilliam shows you how.
Musical standards, with Edward Gardner in the pit, were secure though not vintage, and Berlioz's infinitely delicate score survived just about intact despite being zipped into an all-in-one concept and tumbling out wittily for a choreographic Treaty of Versailles and a dance of the gas masks. The iconography – the 1936 Olympics, Kristallnacht, a glimpse of the Obersalzberg – pinned us...
Based on column inches and lurid images alone, never mind the incalculable online torrent, the big event this week was Berlioz's The Damnation of Faust at English National Opera. After squawks over the company's recent choice of directors from outside opera, it was a pleasure to witness a superbly staged, ingenious production from opera novice Terry Gilliam, best known as a Hollywood director and genius ex-Python animator. If you want to use film in opera, and most now do, Gilliam shows you how.
Musical standards, with Edward Gardner in the pit, were secure though not vintage, and Berlioz's infinitely delicate score survived just about intact despite being zipped into an all-in-one concept and tumbling out wittily for a choreographic Treaty of Versailles and a dance of the gas masks. The iconography – the 1936 Olympics, Kristallnacht, a glimpse of the Obersalzberg – pinned us...
- 5/14/2011
- by Fiona Maddocks
- The Guardian - Film News
Nylund/Aldrich/Kerl/Deutsche Oper Berlin Chorus and Orchestra/Lang-Lessing
(Arthaus Musik, 2DVDs)
The jury is still out on Rienzi, Wagner's monstrous 1842 study of a bourgeois revolution that goes wrong. It was popular in his lifetime, though his eventual dismissal of the score as a youthful aberration has rendered it non-canonical in some eyes. It has also proved dangerous. It was one of Hitler's favourite operas, and though some have argued that its politics are far from national socialism, its relentless evocations of parades, rallies and march-pasts unquestionably affected Nazi aesthetics. Philipp Stölzl's production, which opened at Berlin's Deutsche Oper earlier this year, bravely grapples with the issues it raises by reimagining it in terms of 20th-century dictatorship and presenting it as a warning from history. Some of the design details are non-specific, but allusions first to Weimar Republic painting, then to Leni Riefenstahl's propaganda films leave...
(Arthaus Musik, 2DVDs)
The jury is still out on Rienzi, Wagner's monstrous 1842 study of a bourgeois revolution that goes wrong. It was popular in his lifetime, though his eventual dismissal of the score as a youthful aberration has rendered it non-canonical in some eyes. It has also proved dangerous. It was one of Hitler's favourite operas, and though some have argued that its politics are far from national socialism, its relentless evocations of parades, rallies and march-pasts unquestionably affected Nazi aesthetics. Philipp Stölzl's production, which opened at Berlin's Deutsche Oper earlier this year, bravely grapples with the issues it raises by reimagining it in terms of 20th-century dictatorship and presenting it as a warning from history. Some of the design details are non-specific, but allusions first to Weimar Republic painting, then to Leni Riefenstahl's propaganda films leave...
- 12/9/2010
- by Tim Ashley
- The Guardian - Film News
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