On 11 February 2023, the Hungarian State Opera presents a Bartók double bill featuring two of his pieces that enjoyed their world premieres at the Budapest Opera House over a hundred years ago. The Wooden Prince is staged with a new choreography by László Velekei, whereas Bluebeard’s Castle can be seen in the 2018 production by the Danish star director Kasper Holten.
Bluebeard’sCastle. Photo: Valter Berecz
László Velekei, whose career as a dancer, choreographer and director has been intertwined with the Ballet Company of Győr for the past 25 years, is working with the company of the Hungarian National Ballet for the first time. In his interpretation, the tale told by librettist Béla Balázs about the love between the Prince and the Princess, and the Fairy Witch who challenges it, is combined with a sensitive psychological depiction. It thus becomes a certain type of development story, a coming-of-age tale, with impressive sets...
Bluebeard’sCastle. Photo: Valter Berecz
László Velekei, whose career as a dancer, choreographer and director has been intertwined with the Ballet Company of Győr for the past 25 years, is working with the company of the Hungarian National Ballet for the first time. In his interpretation, the tale told by librettist Béla Balázs about the love between the Prince and the Princess, and the Fairy Witch who challenges it, is combined with a sensitive psychological depiction. It thus becomes a certain type of development story, a coming-of-age tale, with impressive sets...
- 2/2/2023
- by Music Martin Cid Magazine
- Martin Cid Music
Opera is waking up to the power of video. For his new production of Don Giovanni, the Royal Opera House's Kasper Holten collaborated with a designer who turned U2 tours and the 2012 Olympics into visual spectaculars. Stuart Jeffries goes behind the screens
"Don Giovanni is called the director's graveyard," says Kasper Holten. "It's impossible to do a perfect production. The existential moral journey of the seducer to hell is hard enough to make convincing – without having to juggle all the farcical elements, too."
So why is Holten, the Royal Opera House's director of opera, returning to Mozart's work for the third time (he has already directed it on stage and on film)? And why is he ratcheting up the risk with some of the tricksiest, most perilous video design ever seen on the British opera stage?
"It makes sense marrying video technology and Mozart," he explains. "If he were alive,...
"Don Giovanni is called the director's graveyard," says Kasper Holten. "It's impossible to do a perfect production. The existential moral journey of the seducer to hell is hard enough to make convincing – without having to juggle all the farcical elements, too."
So why is Holten, the Royal Opera House's director of opera, returning to Mozart's work for the third time (he has already directed it on stage and on film)? And why is he ratcheting up the risk with some of the tricksiest, most perilous video design ever seen on the British opera stage?
"It makes sense marrying video technology and Mozart," he explains. "If he were alive,...
- 2/11/2014
- by Stuart Jeffries
- The Guardian - Film News
Bengtsson/Futral/Maltman/Petrenko/Concerto Copenhagen/Mortensen
(Axiom Films)
Released on DVD under the opera's original title, this is actually Kasper Holten's film Juan, aimed at the European and Us arthouse circuit, though UK showings have been rare. Based on Don Giovanni rather than interpreting it, it's a striking, piece of work. It's not for purists: insisting on cinematic cogency, Holten cuts and reorders the score in ways no one would find acceptable in the theatre. Transforming the opera into an erotic thriller, the film was shot in Budapest, with the performers singing live on set rather than lip-synching to a pre-recorded soundtrack. There are acknowledged debts to the Bourne trilogy and Steven Soderbergh's Traffic. But hooded figures lurking in doorways remind us of Don't Look Now, and there are inevitable, if unintentional, parallels with Shame.
Holten offers variants on Mozart's narrative. Juan/Giovanni (Christopher Maltman) is an artist-pornographer,...
(Axiom Films)
Released on DVD under the opera's original title, this is actually Kasper Holten's film Juan, aimed at the European and Us arthouse circuit, though UK showings have been rare. Based on Don Giovanni rather than interpreting it, it's a striking, piece of work. It's not for purists: insisting on cinematic cogency, Holten cuts and reorders the score in ways no one would find acceptable in the theatre. Transforming the opera into an erotic thriller, the film was shot in Budapest, with the performers singing live on set rather than lip-synching to a pre-recorded soundtrack. There are acknowledged debts to the Bourne trilogy and Steven Soderbergh's Traffic. But hooded figures lurking in doorways remind us of Don't Look Now, and there are inevitable, if unintentional, parallels with Shame.
Holten offers variants on Mozart's narrative. Juan/Giovanni (Christopher Maltman) is an artist-pornographer,...
- 12/12/2012
- by Tim Ashley
- The Guardian - Film News
The Observer's critics pick the season's highlights, from the Misanthrope to Johnny Marr, Lulu to Lichtenstein, H7steria to Hitchcock. What are you most looking forward to? Add your comments below and download a pdf of the calendar here
December | January | FebruaryDecember
1 Film The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (3D)
Well, not so very unexpected. Every move has been tracked by fanboys, from the casting of Martin Freeman as Bilbo and Benedict Cumberbatch as the dragon Smaug to the return of the king, Peter Jackson, to take over directing from Guillermo del Toro. But Middle-earth (or, as it's sometimes known, New Zealand) is back for the next three Christmases.
3 Pop Scott Walker
The avant-garde Walker Brother returns with his first album since 2006's The Drift. Not for the faint-hearted, Bish Bosch finds the former romantic hero deep in dystopian territory, at once sonorous and rigorous.
3 Classical H7steria
World premiere of...
December | January | FebruaryDecember
1 Film The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (3D)
Well, not so very unexpected. Every move has been tracked by fanboys, from the casting of Martin Freeman as Bilbo and Benedict Cumberbatch as the dragon Smaug to the return of the king, Peter Jackson, to take over directing from Guillermo del Toro. But Middle-earth (or, as it's sometimes known, New Zealand) is back for the next three Christmases.
3 Pop Scott Walker
The avant-garde Walker Brother returns with his first album since 2006's The Drift. Not for the faint-hearted, Bish Bosch finds the former romantic hero deep in dystopian territory, at once sonorous and rigorous.
3 Classical H7steria
World premiere of...
- 12/2/2012
- The Guardian - Film News
Queen Elizabeth attended the Royal Opera in London last night (30.10.12). The British monarch was at the city's Royal Opera House (Roh) with her husband, the Duke of Edinburgh, for a gala Diamond Jubilee celebration. The performance staged was 'Extraordinary World' - a mix of opera, ballet and music - featuring Daniel Oren and Barry Wordsworth with the Orchestra of the Royal Opera House. The queen wore a white and silver lace bodice, designed by Angela Kelly, and was welcomed to the venue by chief executive Lord Hall, chairman Simon Robey, Director of Opera Kasper Holten and the Royal Ballet Director Kevin O'Hare. Her Majesty was then presented with a posy by nine-year-old Rashema Brissett, who is on...
- 10/31/2012
- Monsters and Critics
★★★☆☆ A word to the wise - this contemporary visualisation of Mozart's famous opera is unlike any version you are likely to have seen before. In fact it's unlike anything you are likely to have seen before, period. The debut feature film from Kasper Holten (Director of Opera at London's Royal Opera House), Don Giovanni (Juan, 2010) stars English baritone Christopher Maltman as the titular character with a one track mind, whose racy past eventually catches up with him in spectacular fashion.
Read more »...
Read more »...
- 10/9/2012
- by CineVue UK
- CineVue
Musicals have no problem attracing young audiences, while opera does. But is their respective appeal really so different, asks Live magazine writer Laura Blumenthal
'It's a lack of familiarity," Christopher Millard says. "They're less likely to have encountered it through their lives." Millard, head of communications at the Royal Opera House, is talking about that perennial problem facing opera companies – attracting a young audience. Whatever they do, it seems, the picture of the opera audience is fixed in the public mind: white, wealthy, ageing. Last week, Film&Music interviewed Peter Gelb, the general manager of the Metropolitan Opera in New York. By broadcasting the Met's operas to cinemas on both sides of the Atlantic, he explained, the Met has reduced the average age of its audience, from 65, to 62 or 63. So, when Roland Taylor, the English National Opera's director of participation, says attracting a younger audience is "very much a priority...
'It's a lack of familiarity," Christopher Millard says. "They're less likely to have encountered it through their lives." Millard, head of communications at the Royal Opera House, is talking about that perennial problem facing opera companies – attracting a young audience. Whatever they do, it seems, the picture of the opera audience is fixed in the public mind: white, wealthy, ageing. Last week, Film&Music interviewed Peter Gelb, the general manager of the Metropolitan Opera in New York. By broadcasting the Met's operas to cinemas on both sides of the Atlantic, he explained, the Met has reduced the average age of its audience, from 65, to 62 or 63. So, when Roland Taylor, the English National Opera's director of participation, says attracting a younger audience is "very much a priority...
- 12/16/2011
- The Guardian - Film News
Copenhagen Opera House
Poul Ruders obviously likes operatic dystopias. After the futuristic Handmaid's Tale and the paranoid parable of Kafka's Trial, his latest stage work, introduced this month by the Royal Danish Opera, is set in the most omnipresent of all contemporary dystopias, the Us.
Dancer in the Dark is derived from Lars von Trier's 2000 film. Selma, a Czech immigrant (played by Björk on screen), has brought her son Gene to the Us in the 1960s to find treatment for the congenital condition that has almost blinded her and will take his sight, too. It's hardly the prosperous land she's expecting, and her trailer-park life of manual labour, earning the money for her son's operation, ends in tragedy – Selma is convicted of murder and sentenced to death, though learns before she is hanged that Gene's sight has been saved.
Von Trier's film lasts 140 minutes; Ruders' one-act version, with a text by Henrik Engelbrecht,...
Poul Ruders obviously likes operatic dystopias. After the futuristic Handmaid's Tale and the paranoid parable of Kafka's Trial, his latest stage work, introduced this month by the Royal Danish Opera, is set in the most omnipresent of all contemporary dystopias, the Us.
Dancer in the Dark is derived from Lars von Trier's 2000 film. Selma, a Czech immigrant (played by Björk on screen), has brought her son Gene to the Us in the 1960s to find treatment for the congenital condition that has almost blinded her and will take his sight, too. It's hardly the prosperous land she's expecting, and her trailer-park life of manual labour, earning the money for her son's operation, ends in tragedy – Selma is convicted of murder and sentenced to death, though learns before she is hanged that Gene's sight has been saved.
Von Trier's film lasts 140 minutes; Ruders' one-act version, with a text by Henrik Engelbrecht,...
- 9/14/2010
- by Andrew Clements
- The Guardian - Film News
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