Hints and tips:
...Eva-Maria Van Acker’s costumes are a mishmash of baroque bustles with modern hoodies and sports shoes, Thilo Ullrich’s sets a clever glimpse into the inner workings of baroque stage mechanics....
...The appearance prompted social memes comparing him to former Argentine first lady Eva Perón and Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, although close-up footage revealed the president panting for air....
...The Connection (Shirley Clarke, 1961, US) A group of heroin addicts await their dealer in a rundown New York loft as a documentary crew looks on....
...Shirley Apthorp is the FT’s opera critic based in Berlin Go here for a list of devices on which this content is available....
...On Tuesday’s opening night, Anne Schwanewilms earned some hefty boos for her Eva, which had insecure moments....
...Eva-Maria Westbroek’s Marie is more frustrated than broken, sensual, enraged. Willard White makes a subtly sinister Doktor, Marcel Beekman lends a note of high camp to the part of Hauptmann....
...The evening’s most agreeable vocal surprise was Benjamin Bruns’s lush, musically intelligent David, with Sara Jakubiak’s Eva ensuring further musical pleasure....
...Redeeming features included an endearing assemblage of erstwhile opera greats as the small-role Mastersingers (Siegfried Jerusalem, Reiner Goldberg, Graham Clark, Franz Masura), Julia Kleiter’s feisty Eva...
...Eva Veronica Born has turned the vast industrial space of Duisburg’s Kraftzentrale into a slow meditation on light and time....
...When the man in the grey suit rounds off his embrace of his willing ward Celia (Eva Bauchmüller) by burning her neck with his cigar end, her face shows a dawning realisation....
...Eva-Maria Höckmayr’s ambitious staging tries to locate the action concurrently today and in Charlemagne’s court....
...Even Eva-Maria Westbroek in the title role could not redeem the evening. Normally a formidable communicator, she was reduced here to awkward posturing and forced vocal lines....
...In fact the production’s greatest strength is Eva-Maria Westbroek. She makes the title role so much her own that it is impossible not to be moved....
...Eva is, understandably enough, more drawn to Sachs; Saccà is vain, strained and tasteless....
...Katharina and Eva must have known exactly what they were getting. What Castorf has served up so far is much like his Volksbühne stagings....
...The real question about this production is why, of all the people they could have chosen to stage the Ring for Wagner’s 200th birthday, Festival directors Eva and Katharina Wagner chose Castorf....
...Additional reporting by Shirley Chen...
...Additional reporting by Shirley Chen in Shanghai...
...Katharina, who with her half-sister Eva has been so rashly handed the reigns of the Bayreuth Festival, is 30....
...Michaela Schuster’s Fricka is tame but inoffensive, Ain Anger’s Hunding dark and dangerous; Eva Johannson reaps more boos than she deserves for an accurate Brünnhilde that takes too few risks....
...As the young Nuri, Eva Liebau managed to sound convincingly child-like and pure....
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