Ankstesnės produkcijos apžvalgos
3Die Reise ins Jenseits erlebt der Betrachter als rituelle Handlung in surrealen Lichtstimmungen (Bühne: Sascha von Riel) und voll hoher Suggestionskraft. Originell auch die Kostüme von Johanna Trudzinsky: Isolde beispielsweise mit vier goldenen Federn als Kopfputz, Tristan mit einer leuchtenden Kerze auf dem Kopf. Die fürs Spiel erforderlichen Requisiten stehen auf einem Tischchen vor dem Orchester bereit: zahlreiche Lichtobjekte, vom Leuchtbuch über leuchtende Gondoliere-Stäbe und leuchtende Planetenkugeln. Der titelgebende Kopernikus wird nur kurz zitiert, mit den von ihm entdeckten Sternen, der Bogen der Wissenschaft Astral-Wissenschaft dann bis zu Albert Einstein gestreckt.
Christopher 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.
Nadine Sierra as Gilda was outstanding. She is a light soprano, perhaps too much so for the second part of the opera, but was convincing at all times. Her ‘Caro nome’ was the best moment of the night: she gave an authentic demonstration of breath control in a final, endless note. I would also highlight her performance in the duets with Rigoletto and with the supposed Gualtier Maldé.
