Tag Archives: esposito

Exemplary Tales of Hoffmann from the Royal Opera

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Offenbach’s The Tales of Hoffmann is a rather difficult opera to stage.  There’s no definitive performing edition and there’s a lot of (too much?) material to work with so decisions have to be made about what to cut.  There’s also the fundamental problem of how to frame the stories of Hoffman’s three great loves as he’s supposed to be recounting them in a bar, while drunk, some years after the events described.  Plus, there is some sense that all three are really just projections of his current infatuation; the opera singer Stella.

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L’aio nell’imbarazzo

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L’aio nell’imbarazzo (A tutor in a jam) is a Donizetti comedy that was popular in its day; both in its original version and revised as Don Gregorio.  It’s now received a new scholarly edition that attempts to get back as far as possible to the original.  That edition was used for a production directed by Francesco Micheli at the Teatro Donizetti in Bergamo in 2022 and filmed for video release.

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Oedipus Rex

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A video recording of Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex is a bit of an oddball really.  It’s quite short (55 minutes) and it’s an oratorio rather than an opera.  I guess it could be staged but the version recorded at the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino in 2022 isn’t.  It’s a concert setting, in concert dress, with music stands.  There’s not even minimal blocking.

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Fatal attraction

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Kasper Holten’s Royal Opera House production of Don Giovanni, seen in cinemas, is now available on DVD and Blu-ray.  It’s a visually and dramatically complex production so it’s probably as well that there’s plenty of explanatory material on the disks and in the booklet.  Es Devlin’s set is a two storey structure that rotates and serves as a screen for a heavy use of video projections by Luke Halls.  These start wth the 2065 names of the women Don Giovanni has seduced and seem to be mostly about what’s going on in Don Giovanni’s head.  The sequence during Fin ch’han dal vino calda la testa is particularly spectacular.

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Not especially magical flute

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William Kentridge’s La Scala production of Die Zauberflöte is mainly notable for its use of black and white projections.  The intention, apparently, is to tell the story as seen by, or even as seen inside, a Victorian camera.  In places this works rather well but at times it’s quite hard to figure out what is actually going on.  Whether it was that hard to read in the theatre I can’t say.  Video recording projections is really hard and i have a lot of sympathy with Patrizia Carmine who video-directed here.  The film of a play of a film thing is really difficult to capture remotely faithfully.

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Into the woods

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Claus Guth’s 2008 Salzburg production of Don Giovanni divided the critics along entirely predictable lines.  It’s a very unusual treatment of Don Giovanni but the concept is stuck to with real consistency and it works to create a compelling piece of music theatre.  The treatment on video too is not straightforward and, in a sense, the DVD/Blu-ray version is as much the work of Brian Large as it is of Claus Guth.

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