Προηγούμενες Κριτικές Παραγωγής
3Both the musical score and Flimm’s staging are finely crafted and offer a wealth of compelling aural and visual material. At its best, the overall effect was akin to a sublime landscape painting rich in detail and impressive in its scope.
Die Einschübe aus Stradellas Kantaten und Opern in „Ti vedo, ti sento, mi perdo“ erzeugen bisweilen jenen Raumklang, auf den das Publikum zumeist vergeblich wartet. Selbstredend sind auch die sich in die musikalische Vergangenheit öffnenden Fenster von Sciarrino deutlich überschrieben im Sinne einer Aufarbeitung der 400-jährigen Operngeschichte. Dazu häufen sich auf der Bühne absurde Momente, die situativ an Pirandellos „Sechs Personen suchen einen Autor“ ebenso erinnern wie in der Operncollagentechnik an John Cage. Und wie bei „Warten auf Godot“, so warten auch die Akteure (darunter ein arg redundantes Kinderballett) dieser Handlung vergebens auf Stradella – er kommt definitiv nicht!
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.
