Allzu lange kaute Rameau für den Geschmack des damaligen Publikums auf der Gegenüberstellung von Gut und Böse, Schwarz und Weiß herum. Wäre die Neuproduktion der Komischen Oper Berlin die Uraufführung gewesen, hätte es Rameaus Bühnenmusik wohl auch nicht leichter gehabt.
Der Jahrmarkt von Sorotschinzy wurde zuletzt 1948 an der Komischen Oper Berlin gegeben, inszeniert von dem legendären Walter Felsenstein. Jetzt hat Barrie Kosky, Regisseur und Intendant des Hauses, sich daran versucht.
Mit der ein oder anderen Referenz an das Surreale und das Makabre stürzt sich Barrie Kosky in einer grandiosen Neuinszenierung an der Komischen Oper kopfüber in Hoffmanns alptraumhafte Welt.
The Queen of the Night appeared as a malevolent giant spider, complete with exoskeleton, threatening Tamino with her stabbing limbs and summoning hordes of smaller spiders to writhe over Pamina when the latter hesitated to commit to Sarastro's murder.
Serious farce, warm-hearted sarcasm, operatic Broadway: Barrie Kosky and Komische Oper turn Bernstein's problem child into a show that thrills from start to finish.
There’s no doubt that Mélisande endeavours to escape past troubles when she first appears in Barrie Kosky’s production of Debussy’s opera, yet Nadja Mchantaf is no reticent, wispy maiden. Every vocal and physical gesture – always precise and penetrating – displays an atypically forthright quest for vitality, something that Arkel’s chauvinistic world does not readily offer.
Franz Schreker’s Die Gezeichneten (The Branded One) is an unsettling work given the storyline’s background of abduction and clandestine sexual abuse. Calixto Bieito, as expected, eschews ambiguity regarding what goes on behind the scenes, and casts even the titular cripple Alviano Salvago in a damning light.
The Spanish director offers a controversial angle but tones it down to focus on dark psychology rather than spectacle in his staging of Schrecker's hothouse opera.
Before the beginning of each opera, an announcement is made reminding the audience not to film, photograph, tweet, post, google, snapchat... Komische Oper Berlin premieres a hilarious Barber of Seville where the singers do nothing but just that.
Komische Oper's re-imagining of Nico Dostal's 1933 operetta makes for delightfully escapist, romantic evening out, while Christoph Marti's superb drag performance of the title role makes it a memorable one.
There may be spiders, or zombies above your head. A spook show? Berlin's Komische Oper premiers a gothic musical theatre work by Heinrich Marschner... and it is a gory, good romp.
Barrie Kosky's production of Schoenberg's unfinished masterpiece is brought to musical life by Vladimir Jurowski's intense and compelling interpretation.
At the Komische Oper Berlin, West Side Story has some incredible highlights, but leaves a few too many whys to be wholly enjoyable, with some curious production details.
Usually, I don’t find much to be excited about in opera stagings meant to overhaul the genre, to give it the resuscitation it apparently needs. They are always more promising on paper, always less effective in execution: I’ve seen all kinds of sexual permissiveness, giant machines, film projections, even singing robots (an especially low point).
Signs of birth and death – but moreso death – flash continuously through the Latvian director Viestur Kairish’s new production of Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which opened the Komische Oper Berlin’s 2013/14 season.
At the end of the season, and before closing for the summer break, the Komische Oper Berlin reprise some of their most successful recent productions for one night only in the Komische Oper Festival, including the popular “cartoon” Magic Flute. Included in this busy week was a performance of Tchaikovsky’s Mazeppa, a rarely performed epic opera of battle-torn love and murder.
Die Zauberflöte is a work whose outward simplicity masks internal complexity and even contradictions. Mozart’s music is childishly tuneful and yet reaches for the classically sublime; Emmanuel Schikaneder’s libretto alternates a magical quest story out of a German storybook with Masonic claptrap and secondhand Voltaire.
Germany is the land of Regie-Theater, opera in which the director’s vision is paramount, and where that vision frequently contains an alternative tale in a modern setting based on thoughts that the opera has inspired in the director.
