Tag Archives: nazmi

Der Kaiser von Atlantis

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coverViktor Ullmann’s “one act play” Der Kaiser von Atlantis gets talked about a fair bit but fairly rarely performed.  Operabase lists only three productions worldwide in the last five years.  It was written in Theresienstadt to a libretto by Peter Kien and nether composer nor librettist survived the war.  It’s quite short; well under an hour, and is usually seen as a parody of Hitler and the National Socialists.  I think it’s quite a gentle parody though, especially given when and where it was written.

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A serious take on Les Indes galantes

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I’m not really sure that it’s a good idea to take Rameau too seriously, especially a work like Les Indes galantes but that’s what Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui does in his production for the 2016 Münchner Opernfestspiel.  As written, the piece has five separate parts; an allegorical prelude and four scènes, each telling a love story in an “exotic” setting; Turkey, Peru, Persia, among les sauvages of North America.  It’s a spectacle but it uses the exotic settings to poke fun at certain aspects of Western culture in Rameau’s usual irreverent way.  There’s no linking narrative and the characters in each scène (the goddesses Amour and Bellona aside) only appear once.

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We the sheeple

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Calixto Bieito’s production of Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov recorded at the Bayerische Staatsoper in 2013 is, unsurprisingly, strong stuff.  The central concept is that the political classes “don’t give a fig” for ordinary people and that’s as true , or truer, now than in early modern Russia.  In such a world, where the people are manipulated into acting as their “betters” demand, is it possible for a person like Boris, who has risen to supreme power through manipulation and violence, to have a conscience?

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