Phaedra

“Henze has forged a dazzling chamber music,” reports Der Standard, in a highly favorable review of the Vienna premiere of Hans Werner Henze's opera Phaedra, which I attended last Sunday evening. (The first performance was less than a year ago in Berlin, at the Staatsoper Unter den Linden.) Devouring most of the seats on the floor of the Theater an der Wien, the 20-piece orchestra (Ensemble Modern), supplanted and surrealistically stretched by occasional electronic intrusions, handled the elegant string writing, the delicate sonorities for piano, celesta, percussion, and harp, and the more stridently written brass with finesse and an extremely wide dynamic palate. The singers, despite the sudden replacement of the singer for Phaedra---Magdalena Anna Hofmann---were all enormously bewitching, especially the phenomenal countertenor and baritone Axel Köhler, who sang the part of Artemis.

Olafur Eliasson, the set designer, stole the show. His catwalk connecting the orchestra to the stage (bringing to mind fashion shows or even beauty pageants) allowed the singers to fan out from the orchestra, and to return to it as a kind of home base. Light was a major component, beginning with the steel ring that reflected beams of light around the space, twirling above, in the middle of the auditorium; expanding to three projections of the ring on the curtain, and then, when the curtain is removed, light is reflected and refracted by not one, but two full length and full width mirrors. Quite difficult to convey in words, but mesmerizing. The audience is reflected back onto itself, but not in the brash ‘in your face’ way of Richard Forman’s plexiglass (I’m thinking of “What to Wear”). Instead, the mirrored images are soft and diffuse, and serve to further break down the barriers between actors/singers and audience. (The image in the photo is taken of the mirror on stage, reflecting everything back to the audience, or in this case, the camera.) Had I attended the previous performance, this was a production to return to the next night, with its diverse layers and gripping Greek myth, retold by Henze and his librettist, Christian Lehnert.

There are two reviews in English with further details and contrasting opinions, including photos, of the Berlin premiere: culturekiosque, and musicweb.