Festival: Komische Oper Festival

Biography

At the end of the season, Komische Oper Berlin invites you to a week-long festival. Over seven consecutive days, the audience can look back at the new productions of the season. An accompanying musical and culinary programme awaits them each evening, as does an introductory lecture before the performance and an exciting discussion with those involved in the production afterwards. In the introductions, the dramaturgists of the Komische Oper Berlin will provide background information, put audiences in the mood for the production, and place the respective work within a wider context.

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Korngold's Dead City is not so dead in Berlin

Sara Jakubiak (Marietta) and Aleš Briscein (Paul) © Iko Freese | drama.berlin.de

Renato Verga, 28 Jun

In Robert Carsen's staging, the “dead city” is absent: the scenery showing a bourgeois room that one imagines overlooking a bright avenue in Vienna or Berlin rather than a dark alley in Bruges.

***11

Pelléas et Mélisande © Monika Rittershaus

Katherine Syer, 12 Jul

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.

*****

Die Gezeichneten © Iko Freese | drama-berlin.de

Katherine Syer, 11 Jul

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.

****1

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