Past Production Reviews
2Christopher Ward provided the evening with focused, balanced direction, making sense of the score’s metallic textures, interjections of arrhythmic percussion and myriad musical references without depriving the most grandly-scaled scenes of their force. The choir, too, were on fine form, bringing a vast, weighty sound to key moments. If Mr Widmann intended the opening chorus and the surprisingly optimistic conclusion to sound unwieldy and slightly chaotic, the massed forces of the orchestra and choir gave them an accessible immediacy. Indeed, the musical clarity of Babylon’s most ambitious moments went some distance to tempering the story’s dramatic imbalances. If Mr Sloterdijk’s libretto was unwilling to let plot or character get in the way of large themes, Mr Widmann’s flirtations with traditional operatic pleasures and his ability to construct scenes on an epic scale may prove enough to draw audiences into the opera’s intellectual world. Babylon has traditionally been a world of spectacle, and the opera, for all its attempts at revisionism, was not without its own sense of the spectacular.
A more magnificent, more tasteful, more opulent "Rosenkavalier" has hardly ever been seen. André Heller, multimedia artist and full-time dream inventor, has set out to create an ideal setting for his debut as an opera director, with "sensuousness, beauty and accuracy", as he puts it, in which the full mastery of Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Richard Strauss can unfold could. The Berlin State Opera Unter den Linden is rolling out the red carpet for him: with a luxurious cast of singers and a budget that seems to set no limits to the exuberant fin-de-siècle fantasies of the visual artist Xenia Hausner and the fashion designer Arthur Arbesser
