I can agree with the old man on one point though. He complains about a staged prelude or overture, right? I HATE staged overtures. I’ve seen many, but I’ve never seen one that helped in the slightest.

But I have been to some of those performances where the production was decidedly post-modern and the audience was anything but passive. In David McVicar’s Paris production of Monteverdi’s L’Incoronazione di Poppea, the characters of Valletto and Damighella carried out their flirtation to choreography derived from hiphop. I found it amusing and apt; the majority of the audience booed and whistled at the end of the scene. Also, in Paris, the marvelous production of Rameau’s Les Paladins (available on DVD) which again featured lots of hiphop influenced choreography and video sight-gags was aggressively booed by a small portion of the audience at each of the two performances I attended. David Alden’s spin on Cavalli’s La Calisto which I saw in Munich and which was recently seen at Covent Garden was mostly acclaimed by the audience I saw it with; I loathed it finding it endlessly vulgar and completely at odds with the work.

On the other hand you continue to have many attempts to recreate a 17th or 18th century production both musically and dramatically, check out either Landi’s Il Sant’Alessio or Lully’s Cadmus et Hermione (both on DVD) or the recent production of Rameau’s Hippolyte et Aricie in Toulouse.

But perhaps I’m missing out on those examples you are thinking of?

“Let’s make instant regie……(Mod cool)- geometric shapes, slick chrome, glass,and steel tubing or ( Leftie inclinations) trash and symbols of doom and decay all over the stage. Both concepts must though be 180 degrees off compass of meaning and tradition, and when then stretch the new concept into the realm of the complete nonsensical. After all the composers just provided the incidental music to these ego displays.

What’s the opera really about? Why you haven’t been to a pre -performance lecture from some twit of a director have you? You must accept his opinion and your place in the scheme of things. This is ‘high culture’. There are a lot of fawning bastards around , willing to accept their mental swill.

http://yankeediva.blogspot.com/2009/07/and-show-went-on.html

I was there – it was an unforgettable evening. The audience was delirious and even the critics were clapping like mad. “Cessa di piu resistere” drew unprecedented applause but no encore – there was a funny bit of business with Corbelli consulting his fob watch to marvel at the length of the ovation.

And in my view, those Sellars-Mozart stagings hardly even belong to the regie genre as currently practiced.

Should we meticulously preserve and reconstruct Shakespeare’s anachronisms, while being careful to add none of our own?

Should we adhere strictly to a 19th-century vision of a Renaissance vision of the Middle Ages?

Or are we actually permitted to interpret Verdi’s interpretation of Boïto’s interpretation of Shakespeare’s interpretation of the past?

http://www.markadamo.com/writings/directors