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<< -- 5 -- David Wilkins A VERITABLE WONDER
Olivier Tambosi's production has its moments of absurdity and the usual enervating preoccupation with lurid sexuality. I don't suppose I'll ever understand the significance of three naked women -- but, hey, I feel compelled to mention them so task achieved!
Some baffling and spurious nudity with John Uhlenhopp as Count Heinrich, Heidi Brunner as Eva and Karl-Michael Ebner, Einar Gudmundsson and Josef Wagner as the sinister clowns. Photo © Volksoper Wien/Dimo Dimov
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The castle of the cursed rulers of Irrelohe is a brooding presence destined for its own immolation in this piece of medievalism made mawkish but engrossing by psychoanalytic insight. Anne Gjevang is all very Joan Crawford as the old Lola sent unsurprisingly dotty by being raped on her wedding day thirty years prior to the opera's action. She has a voice of the required Straussian credentials and a clarity of emotional communication in quieter episodes. Whether she looks sufficiently older than Heidi Brunner as Eva -- the current catalyst for temptation and disaster -- is all too moot a point. Wolfgang Koch sings with well-focussed richness as Peter, the son driven to an excess of hammy acting by Eva's desertion. John Uhlenhopp triumphs in all ways as the Count determined through sorely tempted chastity and redemptive love to purge the family curse.
'Whatever happened to Baby Lola?' Anne Gjevang as Lola and Wolfgang Koch as her son, Peter, with a clown of arsonist intent. Photo © Volksoper Wien/Dimo Dimov
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Copyright © 28 November 2004
David Wilkins, Eastbourne UK
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