General Tso’s regie
It truly is a red-letter day when La Cieca manages to propose a Regie quiz that fails to elicit from you clever pusses even a single correct guess. Last week’s opera was something of a double whammy, as it consisted of a modern piece produced in a non-traditional manner. Enough suspense: the work was Henze’s Elegy for Young Lovers as performed at the Aalto Musiktheater Essen, directed by Karoline Gruber.
Shall we try again?
And remember, cher public, the usual rule applies: if you actually recognize the production, then stay quiet while others guess!
Well considering it’s never Mozart, as awesome as a Don Giovanni as this would be, I’m going with something Wagner, as that seems to be the composer of choice for free will interpretation. Meistersinger?
definitely Tosca, can’t believe I got beaten to the punch…
But isn’t the set in photo #1 the same as that in #3? Anything goes in Regie, I suppose, and times are hard – but would they really recycle the filling station for a Tosca production, I wonder?
I’ll go with Don Giovanni.
I’ve changed my mind. It’s not Les Huguenots.
It’s Attila !
1. Odabella makes her entrance with her Amazons. Because the libretto indicates she should be strong and proud, the director requires her to be weak and afraid.
2. The Ezio-Attila duet. Ezio sings “You can have the whole banquet. Just leave the Chinese takeout to me!”
3. This is the lovely Foresto-Odabella duet. The great and future Italy is now represented by a clean filling station. Foresto carries around his bucket of hopes for a unified Italy.
(Although I’m still hoping this might be a rehearsal for the upcoming Huguenots revival. Is it in Montpellier?)
Oh don’t change your mind. That third photo fairly screams Raoul/Valentin duet.
Kat’a Kabanova
Loge’s invocation of Walkure is plausible, but the Hopperesqueness suggests a European view of an American opera. The View From The Bridge, perhaps.