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.
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.
Sorochyntsi Fair was last performed at Berlin's Komische Oper in 1948 by the legendary stage director Walter Felsenstein. Now Barrie Kosky, stage director and intendant, has tried his hand.
Barrie Kosky's production of Schoenberg's unfinished masterpiece is brought to musical life by Vladimir Jurowski's intense and compelling interpretation.
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.
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.
