Kosky phases Lehár's “Merry Widow” in Zurich | EUROtoday

LThe others are annoying. The widow muses. About her life, her love. She sits on the piano and recollects the previous. What you hear is a medley from “The Merry Widow”. Franz Lehár himself recorded it on a piano roll: successful with the director Barrie Kosky, who carried out it on the Zurich Opera House amuse gule served his first Lehár manufacturing.

The ambiguous prelude not solely replaces the overture, which Lehár had already allotted with. It additionally legitimizes itself dramaturgically as a result of the plot relies on a earlier story. And it’s a part of a framework plot that solely turns into clear within the finale with the epilogue that deviates from the unique. The grand piano regularly brings the widow out of her reminiscence and into the truth of the stage. Its black and white keys are customized as dancing gents in tailcoats and girls in white night robes (costumes: Gianluca Falaschi). And in the beginning of the primary act, reminiscence and current overlap when the widow on the piano listens in shock to what’s being stated about her. She truly hasn't even appeared but.

“Uffta!” says the arch comic Martin Winkler because the uniformed Baron Zeta, snappy salute at each appropriate and inappropriate event. Ultimately, it's in regards to the fatherland and saving it from chapter. That's why the extraordinarily wealthy widow Hanna Glawari is meant to marry an area – “Uffta”. It looks like a self-deprecating relic from Kosky's rediscovered Berlin operettas on the Komische Oper, which has now discovered its method into the Paris revue world. A curtain on an empty roundel subsequent to the grand piano is adequate, which outlines Klaus Grünberg's summary stage design in all phases between open and closed. Everything else is exhilarating bodily and dance theater alternating between magnificently choreographed choir and ballet scenes, laugh-filled dialogues and erotic entanglements between the 2 {couples} Hanna/Danilo and Valencienne/Rosillon. What Kim Duddy conjures up on the stage within the type of kneeling, arms stretching, leg swinging, backside exhibiting pyramids and rows is a feast for connoisseurs.

Increasingly psychedelic colours – pink and turquoise – in addition to ever larger colourful tower buildings on the heads combine with the preliminary black and white and eventually take each the protagonists within the salon and the viewers right into a fairytale likeness. The motion on stage suggestively follows the attribute of the music, the rocking: generally extra gently, generally extra dramatically, the ensemble glides backwards and forwards throughout the complete width of the stage. Patrick Hahn on the rostrum of the Zurich Philharmonia very nimbly underlines the poles between the sweetest violin and the powerful leather-based swagger.

Barrie Kosky turns the operetta right into a revue

Kosky can’t utterly neglect his former place of business, as a result of the concept of ​​presenting this operetta as a revue additionally got here from Berlin, when Fritzi Massary carried out The Merry Widow on the Metropol Theater in 1928. However, Kosky will not be involved with reconstruction, however relatively with love, past all important questions on political, financial or social situations. The particular allusions within the libretto are not understood as we speak anyway. And the plot, which is downright obscene for as we speak's listeners, that the widow loses her thousands and thousands to her new husband when she remarries, can safely be ignored as operetta nonsense.

In the baron's salon there may be occasional speak of “melons” – Barbara Grimm as Njegu's worker is the Zurich grasp of language video games. Kosky's widow defies all operetta clichés: she turns into increasingly more like Marlene Dietrich, till within the third act she even swaps her night gown for a tailcoat and smokes – ready for love from head to toe. And a intelligent directrice of the fatherland rescue when she lastly conquers her childhood sweetheart Danilo.

This couple has a whole lot of stage presence by way of appearing, however they don't wish to match vocally. Michael Volle because the considerably worn-out bon vivant Danilo belts out his efficiency quantity with a baritone that’s far too loud, whereas Marlies Petersen as Hanna performs her Vilja music a bit anemic with a skinny soprano. That's a disgrace, particularly because the different couple with the tenor Andrew Owens and, above all, the fabulous Katharina Konradi, who just lately sang Diana Damrau in Munich as Adele in Kosky's “Fledermaus” manufacturing, comes off a lot better. Her Valencienne is a totally “decent woman” who enjoys letting her admirer Rosillon starve on her lengthy arm till she will not refuse within the rigorously locked stage roundel. The males agree on the bodily showmanship, which is promptly adopted by lumbago.

But Kosky wouldn't be Kosky if he hadn't give you a melancholic ending. In the center of the ultimate verse, the ensemble freezes. We return to the start with the grand piano and this time we see Hanna and Danilo standing at it as a married couple. She sings the second, at all times omitted verse of the “Women” music with the criticism of males (“Yes, studying women is difficult”), whereas Danilo leaves the stage. Only when Hanna takes her husband's portrait out of the piano does the plot grow to be clear: Hanna is Danilo's widow and due to this fact not humorous.