Barbie goes to Bayreuth
OperaThis is a signature image from Parsifal, which yesterday opened the Bayreuth Festival.
Similarity to a cinema release is purely incidental.
As for the opera, Andreas Schager (replacing Joseph Calleja) and Georg Zeppenfeld were outstanding as Parsifal and Gurnemanz. Elīna Garanča was cool perfection. Conductor Pablo Heras-Casado was quick and light and director Jay Scheib was booed for no good reason. His use of augmented-reality glasses for 330 audience members appeared to have made little significant difference.
Soon, with A.I., there will be plenty of surprises down the pipeline most everywhere. And after a little while longer there will be no use for flesh and blood (human) singers. We will have all the “cool perfection” we deserve (well, that some deserve).
Yes, indeed! Barbie seems to be everywhere now! But will the movie prove to be one of the greatest of all time??? BTW… Is that Oppenheimer that I see in that photo…hiding under that mushroom cloud?
It’s been like this at Bayreuth since the 90s: great soloists and choir forced into weird costumes and settings, while a routine orchestra running on autopilot helps the conductors (even fake conductors like Domingo) get their job done in the greenhouse climate of the covered orchestra pit.
What hopefully everyone learnt yesterday:
THERE IS NO NEED AND ROOM FOR AUGMENTED REALITY, i.e., these hot and heavy glasses that cause a pain in the neck and injure your nose.
Future directors might simply need a little augmented creativity. 😉
So, please stop producing e-waste and keep it real!
Augmented creativity? Please, no.
I’m withholding any comments one way or the other until a delegation of Republican U. S. senators has weighed in on the production.
I laughed heartily at your comment. Thank you for that lift!
Always happy to brighten someone’s day!
What? It was absolutely DREADFUL Oh for Herheim’s epochal production…
Please elaborate. On Scheib, not on Herheim
It had no ‘take’, for the jaded palate… and obviously did not take the libretto at face value either, for a first timer.
The result was a kitschy look but a boring staging.
In nearly 1000 performances (in a lifetime of opera going) the Herheim Parsifal was the most sickening and insulting load of unmusical codswallop I ever suffered followed by their rat-infested Lohengrin and Calixto’s Ballo & Wozzeck in Barcelona. Regietheater needs to be stripped of its “numpties”. I don’t go to Bayreuth any longer.
There we differ. It was fascinating – and musical. But there is a lot of dross around these days.
These “in the style of” things get very tedious.
If “Barbenheimer” is a thing, then why not Barbie at Bayreuth?
A.R. = Scheib-enkleister
I watched the livestream performance, I agree with Mr. Lebrecht across the board. I found the singing and conducting to be entirely satisfying, which is I think a fine compliment for any Wagner performance. I wasn’t personally bothered all that much by the staging – but of course I don’t know what the experience would really have been like in the house, and it’s possible that the boos were to a certain extent merited while watching it live on stage. However I do have to say I think stagings like this are often just distracting more than they are offensive. I’m all for inventive and creative stagings of Opera but the question has to be asked: what is this telling us about this opera that is in some way fresh? If it’s just about creating visuals and doesn’t take us anywhere different emotionally or intellectually – often a difficult thing to do with pieces we’ve know for a lifetime – it’s likely to be just a distraction.