Offenbach: Les Contes D’Hoffmann, Bregenz Fest – Avemo

   in Opera Now (May, 2016)
French opera leads the way this month, starting with Les contes d’Hoffmann, as Stefan Herheim’s Bregenz production is unleashed upon an unsuspecting public. Eschewing any known edition of Offenbach’s masterpiece, Herheim and conductor Johannes Debus have concocted their own crazy version – and why not? Nothing is definitive. The director sees the opera in terms of the artist as transcending sexuality, so at some point almost everyone on stage cross-dresses. The booklet sweepingly states that ‘artists want […] to be transformed and to change their sexual identity […] to become a sexual predator’. So far, so unpromising. However, Herheim and his hard-working cast do create a fascinating nightmare vision, where …
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