The latest Opera Vision Youtube recording to catch my attention is a recording from L’opéra nationale de Paris of Spontini’s La Vestale. Productions of La Vestale are rare and most Opera Vision streams come from considerably less prestigious houses so this is particularly welcome. I reviewed a Palazetto Bru-Zane audio recording of this work in 2023 and I’m not going to repeat what I wrote about the performance history and the plot. Here I shall concentrate on the Paris performance.
The 2018 Salzburg Festival production of Die Zauberflöte really pushes the envelope of reenvisioning the piece. Is there anything to say about this piece that hasn’t already been said? Lydia Steier thinks so and goes some considerable way tp making her point. So what’s the big idea here? Essentially the kicking off points are that it’s about (in a sense) a dysfunctional family and it’s a fairy tale. So we open on the dining room of a rather depressing bourgeois Austrian family in the mid 1930s sitting down to dinner. There’s the mother, the father, the grandfather and three boys; all rather formally dressed. A portrait of a bride hangs behind the table. The father has a hissy fit and storms out. The mother, who appears to drink, starts breaking things. The grandfather takes the boys off to the nursery to read them a bedtime story.
operaramblings 