Mozart - Don Giovanni (Salzburg, 2021)

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart - Don Giovanni

Salzburger Festspiele, 2021

Teodor Currentzis, Romeo Castellucci, Davide Luciano, Mika Kares, Nadezhda Pavlova, Michael Spyres, Federica Lombardi, Vito Priante, David Steffens, Anna Lucia Richter

ARTE Concert - 8th August 2021

There are many facets to Mozart and Da Ponte's trilogy of operas, many facets of human behaviour that can be explored in them, universal traits that provide no easy answers to questions that on the surface can appear - and be played - as comedies but which underneath touch on some very disturbing subtexts. Don Giovanni can be depicted as villain or a victim of his own lusts - someone who loves too much, as someone who just isn't used to taking no for an answer, or in today's view, as a sexual predator and abuser of women. Don Giovanni is always worth a fresh perspective, but - perhaps more controversially (and it isn't often you can say that there is something more controversial in a production than the stage direction of Romeo Castellucci) - Mozart's score is also worth looking at in new ways. 

Teodor Currentzis has been upsetting those who like their Mozart played in the familiar Classical style for quite a while, but he's certainly not the only conductor finding more interesting facets to Mozart using historically informed direction on period instruments and using reduced ensemble orchestration. With Mozart's opera seria works that might be more palatable - and Salzburg have presented interesting Currentzis directed productions of La Clemenza di Tito in 2017 and Idomeneo in 2019 - but Don Giovanni is a different matter altogether. Rather than simply playing it to a way that has become rote and unadventurous over the years, Currentzis again seeks new ways to explore and express the wealth of character that is within Mozart's music. Forcing the listener to really listen to it. Making it feel fresh, shiny and new again. Like a virgin.

There's a theme that a director like Castellucci would certainly seize upon in a work like Don Giovanni, but there are less obvious ways to approach that. And there's maybe an allusion to stripping away the image of the sanctity of Mozart being forced into accepted conventional interpretations in the opening scene of Salzburg's Don Giovanni. In a white temple like setting, workmen strip away the Christian iconography of a church, leaving the elegant bare white edifice to show its basic underlying structure, ready to be built upon anew. A flame burns away any remaining holiness and indeed, the first person seen on the stage is a naked woman (well, it is Castellucci), one presumably no longer a virgin, since she has evidently been seduced/raped by Don Giovanni.

Rather than keep it simple and minimal, Castellucci then bombards the stage with all manner of effects, symbols and supernumeraries. A car crashes down on to the stage, a wheelchair, basketballs, a broken piano. Don Giovanni, Leporello and the Commendatore are dressed in white, while the avenging Donna Anna comes storming on in black with a retinue of Furies that surround and strive to bring Don Giovanni to justice for his crimes against women. It looks like Don Giovanni has juggled too many basketballs this time. The recitative as Don Giovanni and Leporello make their escape is played out with cartoon eyes on a black screen, Donna Anna mourns the crutch of Commendatore, Don Ottavio pours red powder on his arms and punctures a line of basketballs in his promise of securing revenge.

This is evidently not the Don Giovanni you might be familiar with but neither is it inappropriate to the tone of the work and its treatment by Mozart and da Ponte. It might do something different with the visuals and the pace, the use of instruments and emphasis of the music, but it still engages with the themes and the tone of the work. It's not so much Don Giovanni's debauchery and libidinous lifestyle that are condemned here as much as his failure to accept responsibility for and deal with the consequences of his actions. He leaves death and the destruction of lives behind him (something seized upon with a more political slant in Michael Haneke's version), including a suggestion that he has abandoned a pregnant Donna Elvira (Federica Lombardi doubled with a naked pregnant woman), while a child also pursues Don Giovanni on the stage.

The lightness of the treatment and the heaviness of the underlying implications is borne out in the music. Leporello's 'Madamina, il catalogo è questo' has a lovely lightness, the piano weaving in and out of the musicAeterna arrangement, the beauty of the aria contrasted with the sinister note behind the revelations of conquests. Castellucci provides plenty of contrasting imagery, mixing the absurdity with the comedy, with pointed symbolism and contemporary references that include a photocopier. Likewise he brings Michael Spyres's Don Ottavio on wearing a Danish mountaineer outfit (a familiar inscrutable symbol also used in his Moses und Aron) accompanied by a poodle. It looks ridiculous (several characters have a live animal avatar - Masetto a mouse, Don Giovanni a goat) but takes nothing away from the chilling account of Donna Anna on the recognition of her father's murderer, the scene re-enacted as a Greek tragedy.

Which is something that the legend of Don Giovanni could certainly be said to aspire to, it not being entirely out of place with the opera seria reworkings of mythology that preceded Mozart in the earlier part of the 18th century. Just as Mozart brought a contemporary edge to that genre in his progressive music and Da Ponte in the humanisation of the drama while still retaining the otherworldly elements that elevate it to grand drama - so Castellucci brings a corresponding touch of re-interpretation of an epic myth for a modern age while reflecting and respecting the underlying complexity of the work's blend of surrealism, comedy, tragedy, symbolism and instruction on the consequences of moral dissolution. In an expansive gesture that brings 150 women as extras to the stage, Don Giovanni here is held to account for his crime not by a stone statue, but by the women he has wronged. 

Teodor Currentzis seems to be doing his best to submerge as much as possible any of Mozart's familiar melodic embellishments. Whether this is for the sake of upsetting those who like their Mozart played in a conventionally acceptable way, whether it's out of sheer bloody-mindedness to stake out is reputation for being a fearless re-interpreter of Mozart, or whether he finds it appropriate to reevaluate and strip away the varnish of mannerisms that the work has accrued over the years and present a more historically informed account of the score is something the musicologists can argue over. Aligned with the drama an Castellucci's sensibility, the music however doesn't lose a fraction of its distinctive Mozartian qualities of beauty, sensitivity or dramatic flair.

Think what you might also of Romeo Castellucci's contribution, whether it adds any value or provides any new insights but - much like his stunning Die Zauberflöte for La Monnaie - it's certainly original, often spectacular and rarely dull, always surprising with some new idea that puts emphasis on different aspects of the work. It's also not without the occasional bit of flash/bang showmanship, which Mozart wasn't beyond employing himself. Castellucci has become a stylist in white haze, his productions as distinctive now as Robert Wilson's geometric minimalism in blue, and just as visually arresting in their conception, design and execution. This looks simply stunning and impressively choreographed.

It has to be said however, that it's more of an "interesting" production than a great one. Despite the efforts to bring "real people" onto the stage (see Castellucci's rather more successful Die Zauberföte again) and the impressive efforts to pull it all together into a coherent whole, it doesn't always succeed in finding the human warm within the work where it traditionally should. The idea of making Don Giovanni and Leporello look almost identical is another fine idea that makes the identity confusion more realistic, but it also loses something when the two baritones are practically indistinguishable.

Perhaps just as much at fault as the production, the singing didn't quite measure up or compensate for the lack of human warmth in the production. The singing is generally fine, and of a very high standard, as you would expect, but despite good performances from Davide Luciano as Don Giovanni (stripped fully naked at the finale) and Vito Priante as Leporello, and with perhaps the sole exception of a mighty performance from Nadezhda Pavlova as Donna Anna, the production never allowed you to engage with any of the characters of at least sympathise with their dilemma. Overall, this feels like an admirable production with good ideas and visuals, that despite its controversial trappings, plays out nonetheless in a rather run of the mill fashion.

Links: Salzburg Festival, ARTE Concert

Mozart - Idomeneo (Salzburg, 2019)

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart - Idomeneo

Salzburger Festspiele, 2019

Teodor Currentzis, Peter Sellars, Russell Thomas, Paula Murrihy, Ying Fang, Nicole Chevalier, Levy Sekgapane, Issachah Savage, Jonathan Lemalu

Medici streaming - 12 August 2019

After their take on La Clemenza di Tito in the same venue in 2017, there would have been little doubt that the 2019 Salzburg Festival production of Idomeneo would be controversial; the only question being whether it would be Peter Sellars or Teodor Currentzis who would be most wayward in their in interpretation of one of Mozart's most interesting operas. Well, it's a close run thing.

Mozart's operas are so rich in music and multifaceted in their content and themes that they are eminently amenable to deeper exploration, reinterpretation and modern revision; nothing about them has dated. As an early opera seria however, with a baroque libretto written for André Campra, Idomeneo does certainly still have one foot in a bygone age, yet it is already progressive in terms of Mozart's reworking, reinvention and humanistic outlook. Filtered through the young Mozart's sensibility and remarkable talent, all those conventional laments, jealousies, cruel twists of fate and extreme human sentiments feel vivid, alive and real.

It's so powerful an advance on the mannerisms of the past that it demands an equally imaginative, modern and humanistic interpretation in stage performance. Perhaps not everyone wants it to go as far as Dieter Dorn’s at the Munich Bayerische Staatoper or Damiano Michieletto in Vienna, or indeed as Sellas and Currentzis not unexpectedly take it here, but it's hard to argue that they don't bring a sincere response to the musical and dramatic content of Idomeneo, striving to find a way to highlight the richness of its themes and development of its characters.

Initially however, you are definitely thrown a little off-balance by the oddness of the set developed for the very specific demands of the Salzburg Felsenreitschule. Not a single object on the stage is related to the actual Crete settings of the opera, nor are they naturalistic or in most cases even identifiable. The stage on the floor of the Riding School theatre has clear plastic tubes that rise up as columns with coloured lights, the stage littered elsewhere with misshapen plastic containers, tubes and inflatable blob like creatures - perhaps a different kind of monster that is disgorged by the sea in this age of environmental disaster. The costumes of the Greeks and their Trojan prisoners is militaristic, but the coloured camouflage outfits look more like pyjamas.

As unusual as the set looks, the unfamiliar sound, pacing and rhythms that Teodor Currentzis brings out in the period instrument interpretation of the opera with the Freiburger Barockorchester can be even more unsettling as it sounds very different here from any recording you might be more familiar with. The intention is clearly to push the range of expression that Mozart employs for this opera, marking it out as very different from the baroque works that precede it, exploiting and emphasising the dynamic that Mozart employs for this unique and brilliant work.

At times you get the impression that the intention is also to do everything possible to break away from Mozart as comfortable and easy-listening, perhaps over-emphasising and deliberately pushing against the familiar. It's slow when you expect it to be faster, fast when you expect it to be slower, aggressive when you would expect merely forceful, but it never seems to work against the intent of the work. It hints rather that all might not be as it appears on the surface of the moral, political and romantic dilemmas of each of the characters whose lives have been thrown into turmoil under the curse of Neptune; absolutes and certainties - being saved from the dead, feeling secure in love, family loyalties - are all indeed turned on their head.

What Currentzis and Sellars do however is force you to reconsider the work in new terms, not rest on the certainty of familiarity, but be challenged afresh by every scene, every aria and recitative, every single note, trying to hear what is really being expressed in the melody, the tempo and the instrumentation - the fortepiano notably playing a larger role here than in any version of this work I've heard before.

If you can put up with Peter Sellars's more annoying mannerisms - the choreographic ritualised steps and semaphore arm signals (which are at least better than park and bark performances) - his direction of the internal nature and conflict of the characters is interesting. It's almost what you would expect to find in The Magic Flute: characters out of balance, seeking to find an emotional equilibrium as well as find an accord with the forces of nature and their place in the world, seeking wisdom, seeking answers, seeking peace and willing to endure suffering and trials for it. It does show that Idomeneo is practically a prototype for Die Zauberflöte (With Electra a furious Queen of the Night and Neptune a lesson-giving Sarastro), and in that respect the treatment is thoroughly Mozartian.

Not that some sections of the Salzburg would notice. When it comes down to who upsets them most, the director traditionally gets it in the neck and Currentzis's eccentricities and indulgences are overlooked. In truth, neither are entirely successful and it comes across as a little over-laboured, over-intellectualised, existing in some theatrical vacuum that doesn't entirely connect with Mozart's Idomeneo on a relatable and instinctive human level. It's a fascinating account nonetheless of a magnificent, deeply beautiful work, one that is emphasised by some fine committed singing performances, notably from a sweetly lyrical Ying Fang as Ilya and a fiery Nicole Chevalier as Elektra (almost stealing the show at the finale), but all of the performances impress, including Paula Murrihy as an intensely sincere Idamante and Russell Thomas as a warm and troubled Idomeneo.

Links: Salzburger Festspiele

Mozart - La Clemenza di Tito (Salzburg, 2017)

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart - La Clemenza di Tito

Salzburger Festspiele, 2017

Teodor Currentzis, Peter Sellars, Russell Thomas, Golda Schultz, Christina Gansch, Marianne Crebassa, Jeanine De Bique, Willard White

Medici.tv - 4 August 2017

The stock of Mozart's La Clemenza di Tito has certainly risen over the last few decades. Conductors and directors no longer shy away from its formal opera seria origins or its sympathetic treatment of wise noble rulers, realising that everything that is great about Mozart is as much there in his final opera as it is in his celebrated collaborations with Lorenzo da Ponte. When Mozart's musical language is allowed to exert its own narrative, the work seems to take on an aspect of supreme beauty in relation not so much to the wisdom of an ancient Roman ruler as to the troubles that the human soul has to grapple in recognition of and in overcoming its own flaws and weaknesses.

Directors and conductors have employed a huge variety of ways to bring out this aspect of Mozart's genius in his work, and I've never failed to be impressed with the flexibility with which La Clemenza di Tto is able to transform and adapt, fit around and find humanity in each of its characters, all of whom have their own focus of conflict. Trims have often been made to the recitative and a few arias have been dropped to make up for the six week rush within which Mozart completed the commission, but no-one has felt the need to radically reconfigure and alter the work the way that Teodor Currentzis and Peter Sellars do in their 2017 production for the Salzburg Festival.

Aside from some reconstructions of lost Vivaldi operas, I can't think of another opera production that worked as freely with a composer's material as the Salzburg La Clemenza di Tito, and this is a work that has never been considered incomplete by any means or in need of any reconstructive work. Yet, Sellars and Currentzis eviscerate Clemenza of much of its recitative and choruses in its place add pieces from Mozart's C-Minor Mass, from the Requiem and even the Masonic Funeral Music as an added finale when Titus dies in this production. You would have reason to be worried that the integrity of the piece would be compromised by such unwarranted meddling, but in truth, the intent and the beauty of La Clemenza di Tito remains intact.

The reason for that is obviously that because the heart of Mozart still lies behind all the pieces that have been added and reassembled here. It's still no easy matter to hold that together and retain the purpose and flow of the original work, and with the always controversial figures of both Teodor Currentzis and Peter Sellars involved, there's no guarantee that any such experimentation will work, but in this case it does. The ability of both to put the work in service of meaningful sentiments and situations that we recognise in the world today even allows them to go even further in the musical and stage direction to create something quite remarkable, profound and moving - as remarkable, profound and as moving as Mozart ought to be.

You can pinpoint little moments that work brilliantly; the Benedictus from the C-Minor Mass being the response of the people to Titus diverting the tributes earmarked for a temple in his honour towards the fund to rebuilt homes lost during the last eruption of Vesuvius; the visual placement on the stage of a basset horn accompaniment to Sesto's 'Parto Parto' aria; Annio's heart-rending solo during the Kyrie from Mozart's Requiem following the burning of the Capitol that almost kills Titus; but what matters is that all these moments only serve to bring out the underlying sentiment of love that is twisted by human turmoil and weakness, and how it is translated or redeemed by the human wisdom and forgiveness of Tito. Everything is in service to bringing this out, and it's best brought out in attentiveness to what Mozart's music tells us.

So a lot of responsibility lies with how Teodor Currentzis interprets and arranges Mozart's music, and since this conductor is well-known for his radical reinterpretation and revisions of Mozart's music, that is always going to be both interesting and controversial. The distinctive approach to the balance, arrangement and use of instruments is evident in Currentzis's MusicAeterna ensemble's use of period instruments, including a baroque guitar and an archlute, as well as fortepiano flourishes added during the recitative. It never sounds anything less than completely Mozart, a fresh, contemporary and adventurous response to the deep emotional content within the work, highlighting the strength of the melody and giving it a beautiful open transparency.

The concept and the stage direction are more important here than set designs, the Felsenreitschule auditorium contributing to the atmosphere here, with little else in the way of constructions in George Tsypin set design other than abstract light sculptures. The modern-day costumes and suggested ethnicity of the chorus also has contemporary resonance, as does Sesto's wearing of a suicide vest for his terrorist mission against the state. Flowers, candles and photos are arrayed across the stage at the start of the Second Act in a remembrance display for the victims of this terror attack, which might be a bit of a cliché now, but it does function to highlight the reality of such violence, and the need all the more to respond to it with tolerance, forgiveness and compassion.

The prospect of some heavy-handed messaging is always a risk with Peter Sellars, but here he genuinely taps into something present and real, not an abstract artificial construct of an idea based around terrorism and refugees - and more importantly, it taps into Mozart. Sellars employed a similar theme and technique when directing a merger of Stravinsky's Oedipus Rex with Symphony of Psalms at Aix-en-Provence in 2016 - although keeping them separate, the latter as a 'sequel' to Oedipus Rex - but this is much more ambitious and much more successful in the results it yields.

The direction of the singers and their fully engaged performances also takes La Clemenza di Tito far away from any opera seria mannerisms or formality. As is often the case with this work, the emphasis can shift very much according to the strengths of the singers. Russell Thomas is not the most lyrical or Mozartian Titus, the role often going to softer voices, but you can see him as a figure who commands trust and respect, particularly in his delivery of his concluding arias. Golda Schultz by comparison was a softer, more sympathetic Vitellia, capable of being moved deeply by the horror she sets in motion. The stand-out performances here for me however came from Marianne Crebassa's deeply conflicted Sesto, and from Jeanine De Bique's soaring Annio.

Links: Salzburger Festspiele, Medici.tv

Verdi - Macbeth

Giuseppe Verdi - Macbeth

Opéra National de Paris, 2009

Teodor Currentzis, Dmitri Tcherniakov, Dimitris Tiliakos, Violeta Urmana, Furruccio Furlanetto, Letitia Singleton, Stefano Secco, Alfredo Nigro, Yuri Kissin

Bel Air Classiques

Dmitri Tcherniakov (now there’s a name to strike fear into the heart of every lover of traditional opera stagings) comes up with an interesting concept for this 2009 production for the Paris Opera. He sees the Scottish play in terms of a kind of American Beauty satire of modern life, with GoogleEarth-style 3-D overhead projections zooming into the map of a small surburban town, where we are treated to a peak through the windows into the drawing room of one particular moderately wealthy middle-class family. There erupts a power battle of social climbing, domestic disputes, vanity and identity crises that culminates in moral, social and personal breakdown.

That’s all very well, but Macbeth is Macbeth and American Beauty is American Beauty, and I imagine that some people would rather that the two remain entirely separate entities – except Verdi’s Macbeth was never really Shakespeare in the first place. Verdi does revenge and revolution well, and he also does drawing room melodrama well (it’s hard to beat La Traviata for that), and it’s hard to see Verdi’s Macbeth – which is certainly more domestic than political – as anything other than a Verdi opera, resounding with cries of “Vendetta!”. In the Italian translation, there’s little of Shakespeare’s poetry here (although the English subtitles do attempt to bring it back to the source drama), so if it’s all right for Verdi to adapt it to his favourite themes, isn’t it ok for Tcherniakov to adapt it in a way that it relates to a modern-day audience?

Well, evidently that’s for the individual to decide, but although it’s not without its problems, this production of Macbeth is spectacularly staged and sung, with real feeling for the piece and the underlying psychology that it exposes. Principally, there are only two real sets, one for the drawing room drama, the other for the people of the revolution (the people and the three witches converted into a kind of neighbourhood watch) – which perfectly captures the Verdian division of the essence of the drama. The sets are simple, but imaginatively employed, with dark clouds projected over the street scenes, the 3-D graphics superb for all the scene-setting that is required, and the drama within them is brilliantly and effectively staged. Banco’s death, for example, avoids all the usual on-stage dramatic clichés, and he is found left slumped on the ground as a whirlwind of people disperse.

Whether you buy into the staging or not, the performances are absolutely marvellous. Dimitris Tiliakos’ beautifully soft-toned baritone and his sensitive acting performance (again no opera theatrics here) make for a complex and nuanced Macbeth, working in perfect coordination with an equally intriguing Violeta Urmana, who also avoids all the usual Lady Macbeth clichés and even manages a few conjuring tricks while singing with conviction and personality. Furruccio Furlanetto, in duffel coat, is a superb Banco and Teodor Currentzis conducts the Paris orchestra through a powerful and dynamic rendition of the opera, which is as it should be.

Although quite minimalist, Tcherniakov’s set causes some problems with audio and video reproduction, but the issues are relatively minor. With much of it taking place within a box on the stage, the sound isn’t always as dynamic as it could be, and the choruses aren’t quite as full-bodied as you might like, but the detail is there and the impact is fully achieved with a definite woomph to those big Verdi moments. The staging also takes place behind a fine mesh screen, which slightly softens the image (although it suits the tone and lighting of this production), but the netting is only really evident in close-up and is not a major problem. The disc also includes an excellent 32 minute feature which gives a good idea of the ideas and personalities behind the production, with interviews and rehearsal footage.

Weinberg – The Passenger

Mieczyslaw Weinberg – The Passenger

Bregenzer Festspiele, 2010

Teodor Currentzis, David Pountney, Michelle Breedt, Roberto Saccà, Elena Kelessidi, Artur Rucinski, Svetlana Doneva, Angelica Voje

Unitel Classica - NEOS

Is an opera dealing with Auschwitz automatically worthy of acclaim simply through its dealing with a subject that can’t help but be powerful and emotive? Or are some subjects are just so taboo that they shouldn’t be turned into art, since any attempts to do so will almost certainly diminish them? The approach to Schindler’s List, for example, with its theatricality, its glossy, immaculately-lit and carefully composed cinematography, is certainly questionable, as is the means through which Spielberg chooses to approach the Holocaust, but surely even dealing with the subject and bringing awareness to a wider younger audience has its merit? Written in 1967-8, it’s taken over 40 years for Mieczyslaw Weinberg’s opera The Passenger to receive its World Premiere at the Bregenzer Festspiele in 2010, and on the basis of this remarkable production, it seems that opera is the perfect and perhaps the only art-form really capable of dealing with the complex questions that the subject give rise to.

Dealing with events that took place in Auschwitz from the perspective of looking back on what happened, those questions relate here to the issues of guilt and conscience, specifically over the involvement and culpability of ordinary German people in the atrocities committed during the war in the Nazi concentration camps. The subject is raised as a German official, Walter, is about to set sail with his wife to take up a diplomatic post in Brazil during the 1960s. His wife, Lisa, becomes upset however when she sees a passenger on the ship, a woman who reminds her of a dark episode in her past that she has never told her husband about. The woman reminds her of Marta, a Polish prisoner at Auschwitz, where Lisa was an SS camp overseer.

This is an extraordinary subject to make an opera about, and, as you would expect, it’s treated with the utmost seriousness and gravity and has the potential to be deeply upsetting, the imagery and the setting taking on further significance through its performance in Austria, close to where similar events took place in the past. More than just dealing with the subject in a grim manner – which is easy enough to do through the dramatic situation alone – Weinberg’s The Passenger brings an incredibly more powerful dimension to the subject by making everyone, Nazis and Jews alike, sing. The power of the singing voice can be taken for granted in an opera, but rarely has it been aligned to a subject that is so emotive in its own right, and it serves to intensify both the evil pronouncements of the Nazi camp attendants as well as the laments of the prisoners. But it also has relevance to the story – yes, even in Auschwitz, music was played, and the image this evokes is truly pitiable.



The libretto by Alexander Medvedev, based on a novel by camp survivor Zofia Posmysz (the only one of original writer involved in the opera still alive and present at this performance), manages to evoke these deep and dark sentiments through disturbing poetic imagery (included in full in an accompanying booklet and well worth reading on its own) of the “Pitch black wall of death, the last thing you saw before oblivion“.  That brings to mind the “huge black wave” of Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk and the influence of Shostakovich is evident also in the music.  Weinberg’s extraordinary arrangements include jazz, swing music, waltz and simple theatrical accompaniments but it also has folk laments and dark jabs of strings, woodwind and percussion that underscore emotions of a kind that are rarely, if ever, dealt with in opera. Libretto and score combine then to get to the heart of the subject in the most direct and powerful manner, questioning the attempt of Lisa and Walter to wipe away the memory of the past and move on with their lives, comparing it to the Nazi’s looking for an easy solution to dispose of 20,000 bodies a day. This horrifying concern over practicalities seems to dominate over guilt and conscience and over any deeper consideration of what those actions mean.

The staging at Bregenz is remarkably effective, with incredible multi-level set designs that keep the action fluid, retaining the connection between past and present, the ship above the concentration camp below – an arrangement that culminates in Lisa’s spectacular metaphorical descent into hell. It’s the genius of the opera also that it primarily considers the subject from the viewpoint of Lisa, a former SS Overseer in Auschwitz. It takes in not just those who suffered and died at the hands of the Nazis, but also necessarily takes into account the people who carried out the atrocities, and tries to consider how they can live with themselves afterwards. Forgiving and forgetting, however, is not an option.

The video quality of the Blu-ray release is superb – possibly the best I’ve seen in High Definition – the whites and creams of the ship scenes contrasted with the sepia tones in the Auschwitz scenes, which show remarkable detail for being so dark. The audio is not perfect on account of it being a live performance and with the difficulties of setting up microphones. The music booms and is a little echoing in places, occasionally overwhelming the singing, but more often it’s clear enough to hear the detail and the colour. There is only one track, DTS HD Master-Audio 5.0, which is centrally focussed, but it downmixes to stereo quite well for those with only a 2-speaker option. Subtitles are in German, English, French, Polish and Russian, with an additional Multilingual option for the libretto which uses several languages. A superb half-hour documentary ‘In der Fremde’ covers the background of Weinberg and the history of the opera, including an interview with Zofia Posmysz.