Coliseum; Barbican; Linbury Studio; Queen Elizabeth Hall, all London
Based on column inches and lurid images alone, never mind the incalculable online torrent, the big event this week was Berlioz's The Damnation of Faust at English National Opera. After squawks over the company's recent choice of directors from outside opera, it was a pleasure to witness a superbly staged, ingenious production from opera novice Terry Gilliam, best known as a Hollywood director and genius ex-Python animator. If you want to use film in opera, and most now do, Gilliam shows you how.
Musical standards, with Edward Gardner in the pit, were secure though not vintage, and Berlioz's infinitely delicate score survived just about intact despite being zipped into an all-in-one concept and tumbling out wittily for a choreographic Treaty of Versailles and a dance of the gas masks. The iconography – the 1936 Olympics, Kristallnacht, a glimpse of the Obersalzberg – pinned us...
Based on column inches and lurid images alone, never mind the incalculable online torrent, the big event this week was Berlioz's The Damnation of Faust at English National Opera. After squawks over the company's recent choice of directors from outside opera, it was a pleasure to witness a superbly staged, ingenious production from opera novice Terry Gilliam, best known as a Hollywood director and genius ex-Python animator. If you want to use film in opera, and most now do, Gilliam shows you how.
Musical standards, with Edward Gardner in the pit, were secure though not vintage, and Berlioz's infinitely delicate score survived just about intact despite being zipped into an all-in-one concept and tumbling out wittily for a choreographic Treaty of Versailles and a dance of the gas masks. The iconography – the 1936 Olympics, Kristallnacht, a glimpse of the Obersalzberg – pinned us...
- 5/14/2011
- by Fiona Maddocks
- The Guardian - Film News
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