There are instruments, and then there are instruments. Some are born for the spotlight: the violin, trumpet or lead guitar, magnetic centerpieces that naturally pull the audience’s attention toward them. Others live more in the shadows: the bassoon, double bass, Hammond organ and percussion, the loyal laborers of rhythm and harmony who usually support while others take center stage. But what happens when the background instruments revolt?
 
That rebellion is called ORBI - The Oscillating Revenge of the Background Instruments - a Dutch quartet that gleefully overturns the hierarchy of ensemble playing. Their concert presenting the second album The Age of Greed was a declaration of musical freedom. Classical music, chamber music, progressive rock, metal, film scores and blues collided into something that didn’t need further categorization, it was exhilarating to witness.
 
A set of tracks, in arrangements by Marijn van Prooijen (a kind of 5th band member), performed by a group of classically trained musicians that have formed a band that’s 'guaranteed' lead-singer-free. A concept that might have appealed to Eddie Van Halen, who once complained about the LSD (Lead Singer Disease) both David Lee Roth and Sammy Hagar were apparently suffering from. Here, nobody dominates the stage. Instead, the bassoon sings, growls and shreds. Bram van Sambeek’s instrument takes over lyrical melodies, vocal lines and astonishingly difficult guitar solos. Rick Stotijn’s double bass becomes both rhythmic engine and melodic foil. The Hammond organ of Sven Figee provides towering harmonic mass like a wall of distorted power chords, while Marijn Korff de Gidts’s percussion drives the whole machine forward with relentless momentum.
 
Listening to ORBI reminds you how musical curiosity works. When mainstream pop no longer nourishes you, you start searching elsewhere. For yours truly, that road lead toward opera and symphonic music. Wagner’s Ring cycle opened the gates to classical music for me, someone who grew up on pop, rock and metal. The movement also happens in reverse: once classical music’s borders begin to feel too confined, you return to rock and metal with newly sharpened ears. That journey lies at the heart of Bram van Sambeek’s brainchild. ORBI feels like the product of a musician refusing to choose between worlds.
 
The first ORBI album already hinted at the ensemble’s ambitions to bring classical music and rock together by three Metallica arrangements paying tribute to bassist Cliff Burton, whose fascination with classical harmony shaped pieces like Fight Fire with Fire, Orion and (Anesthesia) Pulling Teeth. The arrangements themselves are remarkable because they preserve not only the structure but the energy of the originals. Guitar riffs have long translated well to strings - Apocalyptica proved that already with Metallica on cellos - but ORBI goes further. Where many crossover projects eventually drift merely into atmosphere, making you miss the original versions, ORBI retains the aggression, momentum and dynamic force of the source material while genuinely adding new colors through the quartet’s instrumentation.

On their second album, The Age of Greed, ORBI continue along the path they have set out on, both musically and thematically. It is structured as a concept album, with the central theme being the current state of the world, in which everything – democracy, civil rights and the environment – is sacrificed to big money and the authoritarian tendencies connected with it. Dystopian visions of the future are nothing new in music (or art for that matter), they have produced some of its most powerful works. Maggot Brain by Funkadelic comes to mind. In Eddie Hazel’s ten-minute guitar solo (which will translate beautifully into a bassoon solo by the way - Ha!), the music moves from funk and soul into the realms of progressive and symphonic rock, traversing from Jimi Hendrix to Pink Floyd. Beyond its sound, the work endures because of its subject matter: the damage humanity inflicts upon the earth and the anxiety surrounding the future of our world. The same intelligence and curiosity that drive artists to ask (uneasy) questions about humanity’s future lie at the core of the The Age of Greed. It gives form to those fears, ideas and emotions and is therefore a heartening boost for anyone willing to listen.
 
At the concert of the album presentation, works by Prokofiev, Muse and Ennio Morricone sat naturally beside a startling suite in which Wagner’s Wotan’s Farewell from Die Walküre dissolved seamlessly into Mahler’s Totenfeier and Urlicht from the Second Symphony. (The moment when Loge is summoned by Wotan transitions quite naturally into the beginning of Totenfeier.) An arrangement that occasionally evokes the work of Uri Caine and the way he reconstructs Wagner and Mahler into chamber-jazz intimacy without sacrificing its emotional gravity.
 
ORBI’s performance was a kind of soundtrack of appropriate melancholy: dystopian, theatrical, darkly seductive and deeply cathartic. A perfect cross-section not only of the ensemble’s influences, but of an entire generation of listening habits in which Mahler, Morricone, Radiohead and Metallica coexist naturally on the same shelf. The colourful, diverse musical landscape that unfolded before us found its culmination in Metallica’s Fight Fire with Fire. The song exploded through the venue with authentic thrash-metal ferocity. It reimagined Metallica with such manic intensity that you half-felt compelled to start throwing chairs through the concert hall in sheer delight. A fast and furious rendition in which the old speed- and thrash-metal characteristic remained intact: an absurd quantity of notes per second. Astonishingly, that hyperactivity works perfectly on bassoon. Van Sambeek attacked Kirk Hammett’s lightning-fast solos with impossible agility, transforming the instrument into something between a concerto soloist and a shred guitar. The effect in this bassoon concerto for the metal age was virtuosic, hilarious and utterly liberating all at once - both musically dazzling and somehow deeply funny in the best possible sense.
 
Metal and classical share the same DNA: virtuosity, emotional extremity, architectural scale and theatrical grandeur. Wagnerian apocalypse and Mahlerian catastrophe are not far removed from progressive metal once amplification and distortion enter the equation. The emotional mechanism that powers film scores, opera, symphonic music and progressive metal are similar: sadness inflated into grand gestures so enormous they become strangely exhilarating. As Bram van Sambeek himself put it: “Sad music cheers me up". One believes him immediately (it’s basically my own premiss when cruising the musical landscape in search of new discoveries).
 
Technically, the concert was not flawless. ORBI initially struggled with some microphone feedback and balance issues - hardly surprising given the bass-heavy instrumentation and the precision required to amplify naturally softer instruments like bassoon and double bass. But once the sound settled, the ensemble unlocked a gorgeous sonic world.

At the end of the concert, during the handover of the new album to the band, the host mentioned a radio debate questioning whether The Age of Greed belonged on a classical music station. The question felt rather odd. For this concert proved, above all, that what may be important to marketing strategists and target-audience analysts is ultimately completely irrelevant to the listener themselves. Good music does not require border control. ORBI’s greatest achievement lies precisely in ignoring categories altogether and trusting the audience to follow. And follow we did - willingly, enthusiastically, into exhilarating new territories of sound.

ORBI - The Age Of Greed (album presentation) / Muziekgebouw aan 't IJ, Amsterdam, 13 May 2026

PROGRAM:
Ennio Morricone The Ecstasy of Gold 
Muse Unsustainable 
Sergej Prokofjev Suite nr. 1, op. 64 “Death of Tybalt”
Richard Wagner De Walkure WWV 86B “Wotan’s Farewell”
Gustav Mahler Symphonie nr. 2 “Totenfeier” & “Urlicht”
Radiohead Spectre 
The Doors The End 
Avenged Sevenfold Nobody 
Metallica Fight Fire with Fire  

ENCORE
Kurt Weill / The Doors Alabama Song (Whisky Bar)

In 1959, Zofia Posmysz was standing on the Place de la Concorde in Paris. There she heard a voice she had heard before, in Auschwitz. The voice belonged to a female camp guard from Auschwitz. She did not know what to do: approach her, speak to the woman, call the police. The incident became the inspiration for a novel: Pasażerka z kabiny 45 (Passenger from Cabin 45). In the novel, she reverses the roles and has the camp guard, Lisa, recognize the voice of a prisoner, Martha, while crossing from Europe to South America on a cruise ship. She is travelling with her husband, who has taken a new job there and knows nothing about her wartime past.

In Die Passagierin, the memory is never entirely reliable — it would later emerge that the voice heard on the Place de la Concorde could not have belonged to the camp guard, who had already died by then — but the power of the memory is undeniable. It sets Lisa's psychological decline and moral reckoning in motion. Based on the book, Mieczysław Weinberg composed an opera in 1968, but he never lived to see it actually reach the stage. Because of Soviet censorship, the work remained unperformed for decades (it rubbed rather too conspicuously against the heroic myth of the Great Patriotic War). It was not until 2006 that a concert performance was given in Moscow, ten years after Weinberg's death; the first staged production followed only in 2010, at the Bregenz Festival. Die Passagierin is an opera about memory and repression that itself almost disappeared from history.

​In this co-production by Dutch National Opera and the Bayerische Staatsoper, director Tobias Kratzer adds a third layer of time to the already fragmented structure of the opera. Alongside the “present” aboard the ship and the past in Auschwitz, an elderly Lisa from the future appears, consumed by guilt. The three timelines existing simultaneously reinforce the central idea that Auschwitz cannot simply be confined to the past. Kratzer also chooses not to portray the flashbacks to Auschwitz literally as a concentration camp, but instead has them take place abstractly on the cruise ship itself. Kratzer has explained that a naturalistic reconstruction — with barbed wire, striped camp uniforms and recognizable iconography — today runs the risk of quickly descending into clichés, or even into a form of aestheticization of the Holocaust. By presenting Auschwitz not as a historical reconstruction but as a mental space, the past remains constantly present in the present. The ship therefore becomes not a safe distance from history, but a floating prison of memories. The focus is not on the set, but on the psychological mechanisms of repression and guilt.
​
I particularly thought the additional, future version of Lisa worked very well on stage. At the end of the first act, she speaks text that originally belongs to the Lisa of the 1960s, but which acquires a completely new meaning here because of the new context (Walter is silent, because he is now ashes in an urn). Kratzer does this more often. He places existing text in a new context in order to create entirely new scenes. He directs with a very strong awareness of the libretto. As a result, even when he departs radically from the original in his staging, he never loses sight of the internal logic of the work. This is particularly evident in his Wagner productions, where he goes very far — his masterful Tannhäuser from Bayreuth left an indelible impression. But Wagner naturally already has an extensive performance history in which theater makers have subjected his operas to a wide range of artistic visions. That is certainly not the case with Die Passagierin, which has only been performed for twenty years and, given its sensitive subject matter, calls for a more cautious approach.

The transitions between the different layers of time are fluid, almost cinematic, and Weinberg's score fuses text, image and drama into an impressive whole. The music accentuates what is being sung and infallibly colours the emotional atmosphere of every scene: from the light, almost jazzy sounds at the beginning to the dark passages in which camp guards report on their “work” — the systematic murder of human beings — in an eerily matter-of-fact tone. The music functions as a psychological soundtrack: atmospheric, highly visual, and constantly creating emotional space rather than merely accompanying the action. This is music that reveals itself fully only in the theatre, as part of a complete production.
​
Like the greatest ambassador for his work, Shostakovich, who also wrote film music, Weinberg's score strongly evokes film music. With all the associations that may entail. The ominous timpani at the beginning reminded me of Jerry Goldsmith's score for Planet of the Apes from 1968 — with the same sense of existential menace and disorientation. Alongside these kinds of associations, which are entirely the listener's own, Weinberg incorporates quotations from other works. He does so in a completely organic way. Quotations from, among others, Britten's Peter Grimes, and especially Bach's Chaconne, flow naturally from the score and never feel forced. When Tadeusz, Marta's lover, is asked to play a waltz in the camp but instead begins playing Bach's Chaconne, music itself becomes an act of resistance — and immediately, a death sentence as well. After this performance, that Chaconne will never (ever?) sound quite the same again.

The opera ends without redemption. Marta addresses the future with the warning that “when your voices disappear, we will all perish”, while Lisa receives no form of absolution whatsoever. In Kratzer's version, this is made even more explicit when the elderly Lisa ultimately jumps overboard: not a dramatic final chord of repentance, but a last attempt to escape from a past that can no longer be avoided.

Die Passagierin, like films about the Holocaust, inevitably raises uncomfortable questions. To what extent can art bring the past back to life? Or does history, once transformed into a novel, a play or an opera, inevitably also become a form of aesthetic experience — and therefore of entertainment? Kratzer is aware of this danger and refuses refuses to “re-enact” Auschwitz through realistic imagery. The small television placed at the front of the stage at the end shows grainy black-and-white footage. It is barely recognizable, but one can guess what the images represent. It is the production's only realistic reference to the Holocaust.

Whether it is appropriate or not to use the Holocaust as the subject of an opera, Weinberg, who lost his entire family during the Second World War, believed it was. Art can prevent us from becoming desensitised; it can make us feel what is ground to dust between the millstones of history. And Die Passagierin reminds us of what opera is (also) capable of. Opera is not condemned to the realm of romantic entanglements, melodrama and beautiful suffering. It is precisely its excessiveness – the music, the voices, the theatricality and the emotional intensity – which, like no other art form, can forge a connection with intimate feelings, that makes it ideally suited to weighty subjects. No subject should be too serious, too painful or too difficult for opera. After all, opera need not be a soap opera blown up to orchestral proportions (consume Donizetti in moderation); it can be an art form in which history, memory and moral catastrophe, with emotional and intellectual power, can lead to a theatrical experience that brings about something essential and nourishes the mind. Die Passagierin offers no answers to the big questions that history poses to us (and which the present poses to us once again). It does not make the unimaginable entirely imaginable. It seeks the human dimension in a world that can be monstrous, and reminds us that the history to which she refers – despite a sublime theatrical experience – must never come to feel comfortable.

DIE PASSAGIERIN, Dutch National Opera, Amsterdam 24 April 2026 

Music: Mieczysław Weinberg
Libretto:  Alexander W. Medvedev

Conductor: Adam Hickox
Regie: Tobias Kratzer

Lisa  Jenny Carlstedt
Alte Lisa  Sibylle Maria Dordel
Walter  Nikolai Schukoff
Marta  Sylvia D’Eramo
Tadeusz  Gyula Orendt

In 2019, Goerne said he was giving himself another five years as a singer. It is now well past 2024, and fortunately he has gone back on that decision. But time is running out, and hearing Goerne perform live – with retirement on the horizon – is a real treat. In Milan, at the Teatro Dal Verme, Goerne gave a recital of songs by Franz Schubert in orchestral arrangements for baritone and ensemble (three cheers! – the CD ‘Schubert Revisited’ featuring these orchestral arrangements of the songs is firmly stuck in my CD player). Goerne has lost weight; he seems more fragile – I can no longer see him returning to a full-scale ‘Walküre’ Wotan – but as a lieder singer, and especially in Schubert, he remains a sensation.

Before the concert began, conductor Diego Fasolis asked the audience not to applaud between songs, but to wait until the end, as one would with a symphony. In the first two songs ('An Silvia' and 'Schäfers Klagelied'), the balance between the Orchestra I Pomeriggi Musicali and Goerne still felt somewhat precarious. The voice seemed to struggle with an overly intrusive orchestral presence – as if the singer were walking through a forest where the branches of the trees were being whipped into his face by a strong wind. Schubert’s intimacy was momentarily pushed into the background here. But from the third song ('Des Fischers Liebesglück') onwards, everything fell into place. The orchestral timbres and the polished timbre of Goerne’s voice began to interlock with remarkable precision. What followed was a deeply compelling Schubert, a seamless fusion of melody, text and tone colour, in which nothing was imposed and everything came about naturally.

A few days before my visit to the opera in Vienna, conductor Zubin Mehta arrived at the Wiener Musikverein in a horse-drawn carriage where he was to give a concert. In Vienna, more than elsewhere, decorum is important: one goes to the opera or a concert in style.  For my own visit to Le Grand Macabre, I wore a pair of worn-out jeans with loose stitches; the result of a city walk that took longer than planned, meaning I couldn’t return to my accommodation to change. I may have stood out a bit, I didn’t feel entirely at ease walking around the Wiener Staatsoper, but this deviation from the norm did feel fitting for Le Grand Macabre: Ligeti’s self-proclaimed ‘anti-anti-opera’.

There is a moment in Le Grand Macabre where everything finally seems to fall into place: the interlude between scenes three and four. Here, the grotesque humor, the sonic collage, and the fractured dramaturgy suddenly coalesce into something lucid. In that passage, one recognizes György Ligeti as the composer whose music has so often found its way into film - capable of evoking vast, existential unease. It is also the moment that reveals what this opera according to its composer truly is: not a comedy, but a deeply unsettling tragedy.

It is a striking realization, because much of Le Grand Macabre seems determined to obscure precisely that depth. Ligeti’s only opera - a grotesque, absurdist meditation on death, the apocalypse and human folly, loosely based on Michel de Ghelderode’s play La balade du grand macabre - is a work that premiered in 1978. It defies and parodies operatic conventions, leaving the audience often unsure as to what is ironic and what is sincere, and tossing them back and forth between extremes. 

Ligeti sets out to create a world that is grotesque and humorous, yet laughter remains elusive. The famous use of car horns in the overture, for instance, begins as a provocative gesture, but quickly overstays its welcome. Similarly, the buffoonery surrounding Prince Go-Go stretches beyond the point where it can sustain comic energy, tipping instead into irritation. What might work as a brief absurdist flourish becomes labored when extended. Ligeti’s humour, his means of satire, often resembles a kind of avant-garde cabaret that has not entirely withstood the passage of time. (I had a similar feeling with some of the 'gimmicky' passages taken from Stockhausen's Licht-cycle a few years ago at the Holland Festival in Amsterdam; scenes with blunt, adolescent-like humour within a whole of grand theatre and sophisticated music.)
​
An opera  with grotesque humour and apocalyptic themes. It seems, considering the current state of affairs, obvious why the Vienna State Opera is staging Le Grand Macabre again following the 2023 premiere of this production. And since we are in Vienna, director Jan Lauwers gave, quite appropriately, the opera an operetta-style setting. Visually dazzling, with stage design and costumes that evoke both the grotesque and the whimsical, depicting a world on the brink of apocalypse but too absorbed in its vices to notice. The opera alludes to a profound tragedy. Ligeti’s own biography - marked by the tragedy of the Holocaust in which a large part of his family perished - suggests a composer with urgent stories to tell. But whether he succeeds as a storyteller here remains, at least for me, an open question. One senses a profound awareness of mortality and absurdity, a need to grapple with catastrophe not through solemnity but through distortion and exaggeration. In doing so, Ligeti makes frequent use of irony. People laugh, but are not happy. People tell a joke, but are not funny. Here, irony strips satire of its various layers, raising questions about the way Ligeti employs it. Instead of creating a fascinating ambiguity, what is complex becomes merely banal.

Ambiguity can be intriguing. By leaving room for interpretation, it can accommodate a multitude of meanings simultaneously, thereby lending a work greater depth. But that is not my experience with Le Grand Macabre. The all-encompassing irony turns us, the audience, into people held hostage by the Joker, waiting for Batman to come and rescue us. It is as if the opera does not dare to fully commit to its own emotional core. In the programme notes, conductor Pablo Heras-Casado draws a comparison with Wozzeck and Die Soldaten. Especially the comparison with Bernd Alois Zimmermann’s Die Soldaten is instructive here: Zimmermann also employs fragmentation and complexity, but his work achieves an overwhelming theatrical unity, a totalizing vision of human experience. In contrast, Le Grand Macabre can feel diffuse. Its ideas are plentiful - musically and conceptually - but they do not always cohere into a focused dramatic trajectory.

Musically, the evening made a compelling case for Ligeti’s stature. His score, dense with ideas and layered with meticulous care, came across with remarkable clarity from the pit. Under the direction of Pablo Heras-Casado, complex textures never turned opaque; they shimmered with detail, allowing Ligeti’s tapestry of sound to unfold in full. 

On stage, however, the challenges for the cast were undeniable. Ligeti demands performers who are not only vocally fearless, but also impressive actors. The vocal score is renowned for being extremely difficult – full of extreme leaps, rhythmic complexity and almost impossible precision – yet is often curiously detached in terms of expression. To bridge this gap, singers must amplify their physical and theatrical presence, which only adds to the struggle with the already demanding material. While the vocal acrobatics may dazzle, they frequently overshadow any genuine emotional connection.

Ultimately, Le Grand Macabre remains an opera that leaves more a than few questions unanswered. I saw a production that, both musically and theatrically, was as good as it reasonably could be – the questions concern the opera itself. It is an opera that emphasises its own importance, whilst at the same time undermining it at every turn. You are impressed by it, share in the excitement, but ultimately are left not entirely convinced. Ligeti’s ‘anti-anti-opera’ offers moments of undeniable brilliance, but it fails to bridge its extremes, preventing it from forming a satisfying whole.

LE GRAND MACABRE - György Ligeti / Wiener Staatsoper, 25 March 2026

Nekrotzar: Georg Nigl
Chef der Gepopo / Venus: Sarah Aristidou
Fürst Go-Go: Xavier Sabata
Amanda: Maria Nazarova
Amando: Isabel Signoret
Astradamors: Wolfgang Bankl
Mescalina: Marina Prudenskaya
Piet vom Fass: Gerhard Siegel
Weißer Minister: Daniel Jenz
Schwarzer Minister: Hans Peter Kammerer
Ruffiack: Andrei Maksimov
Schobiack: Alex Ilvakhin
Schabernack: Dohoon Lee

Conductor: Pablo Heras-Casado
Director (regie and staging): Jan Lauwers
Costumes: Lot Lemm

​Imprints of Man is a release that re‑imagines the dense, dissonant world of Imperial Triumphant’s death‑metal oeuvre through the intimate lens of solo piano. Conceived by bassist, pianist and filmmaker Steve Blanco, the record does not masquerade (pun intended) as a side‑project; it bears the Imperial Triumphant name, signalling that the band’s artistic intent remains intact even as the sonic medium shifts dramatically.

Historically, piano transcriptions have served several purposes. In the nineteenth century, Franz Liszt reduced orchestral scores to the keyboard, so that listeners, in an era before recorded sound, could experience symphonic music without needing a complete orchestra. Those reductions were not mere shortcuts; they preserved contrapuntal intricacy, timbral suggestion, and structural clarity, allowing the piano to act as a “transparent window” into the larger work. Imprints of Man follows this lineage, yet it also embraces a more modern rationale: the piano becomes a laboratory for reinterpretation. By stripping away the guttural growls, relentless blast beats, and distorted guitars, Blanco exposes the underlying harmonic clusters, rhythmic elasticity, and melodic fragments that animate Imperial Triumphant’s compositions. The result is a set of pieces that feel simultaneously familiar and freshly alien.

Imperial Triumphant has long positioned itself at the crossroads of avant‑garde jazz, urban soundscapes, and the extremities of metal. Their influences range from big city jazz and free‑form improvisations, of someone like Charlie Mingus, to the dark textures of Mayhem and Immortal. Imprints of Man extends this trajectory by invoking the Romantic virtuosity of Franz Liszt, the mystic chromaticism of Alexandre Scriabin, and the impressionistic color palette of Claude Debussy. The piano arrangements do not soften the material; they recast it. (With exception of the album closener, an adaptation of J.S. Bach’s F# Minor Fugue, here Bach remains unmistakably Bach, offering the most accessible moment on the record.)  Where a typical Imperial Triumphant track assaults the listener with layered distortion and rapid tempo shifts, the piano versions invite a slower, more contemplative listening mode. Complex chord clusters become audible sonic fingerprints, and the rhythmic drive is rendered through percussive keystrokes and dynamic pedaling.

In Imperial Triumphant’s music, the sheer visceral force is inseparable from a mental reshaping of perception. Stripped of that raw assault, the piano’s crystalline clarity allows listeners to trace thematic arcs, hear delicate voice‑leading, and mentally map the structure of each piece. The result is a listening experience that stimulates both intellect and feeling, in which these piano arrangements sound, more than their metal originals that can come across as deliberately ambiguous to resist definition, as if they pursue a definite purpose. Because the piano both illuminates the compositional skeleton and tempers the overwhelming intensity of the source material, the translation inevitably alters the balance between precision and raw power.  Although a piano certainly does not lack vigour (Mussorgsky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition” is always a case in point here: the original piano version offers a sharpness and immediacy that the later orchestral arrangements often loses), some of the raw aggression inherent to the original tracks inevitably dissipates in the piano medium, which may leave some yearning for the visceral punch. But the pieces can stand on their own, and we always have the originals.
 
Imprints of Man bridges the gap between the ferocity of death metal and the introspection of a solo piano. It is always interesting to see how music can evolve across contexts - shifting from their natural habitat into another environment, from metal mayhem to the more reflective quiet of a personal space - and expanding its reach and references. On Imprints of Man, Blanco invites us to examine the architecture of sound, and appreciate the source material from multiple, equally valid perspectives. It results in an album that finds its place in a playlist just as fine next to “Sviatoslav Richter plays Scriabin” as next to Goldstar or Spirit of Ecstacy.

Algorithmic imagination
It is only fitting that a production of Parsifal, Wagner's “Bühnenweihfestspiel”, confronts us with new possibilities for staging an opera. Since its premiere in Bayreuth in 1882, Parsifal has always been more than just a musical work. It is an opera that raises questions about philosophy and religion, an opera that would raise important questions about how to stage an opera and thus be at the cradle of important theatrical developments in the 20th century. After the Second World War, each generation seems to have recreated the work for its own time: Wieland Wagner's minimalism stripped the work of its mythological trappings in the 1950s and presented it as a meditation on redemption; Hans-Jürgen Syberberg turned it into a cinematic drama full of psychoanalysis, symbolism and Vergangenheitsbewältigung in the 1980s; Calixto Bieito placed the Grail community in Covid times in a post-apocalyptic landscape populated by zombies (a kind of Walking Dead Parsifal) and now, at Opera Vlaanderen, Susanne Kennedy and Markus Selg carry Parsifal into the post-digital age by condemning him to an aesthetic of algorithmic imagination.

A musical triumph
If the staging led to division (we will come back to that later), this was certainly not the case with the music. Conducted by Alejo Pérez, the Symfonisch Orkest Opera Ballet Vlaanderen played with great clarity - a transparency of sound that Wagner himself would not have advocated when he composed the piece with the acoustics of the Festspielhaus in mind. Whereas in Bayreuth the orchestra sits below the stage, allowing the music to blend into a mystical soundscape, here the orchestral sound was open and exposed: refined strings, softly glowing brass and fresh-breathing woodwinds. Pérez's tempi were supple; he pulsed gently through the four-hour score in one long breath. One could hear how Wagner's harmonies never rest, but are constantly moving, always evolving – music as an atmospheric phenomenon.

The Choir and Children's Choir of Opera Ballet Vlaanderen have probably never sounded better. The final chorus was exceptionally heartfelt and radiant: redemption not through faith, but through pure, sublime beauty of sound.

A Parsifal in ten days
At the centre of it all was Christopher Sokolowski, who made his role debut as Parsifal following Benjamin Bruns' sudden departure – a role he learned in ten days, according to his own account (the press release mentioned three weeks). The result was nothing short of astonishing. His voice - clear, open, with a core of steel - conveyed both innocence and latent authority. His natural naivety was moving: not a seasoned messiah, but a boy who discovers his compassion step by step, amazed at the world he must save.

Sokolowski's Parsifal is in the tradition of lyric tenors who approach the role from Lohengrin rather than Tristan: lighter in tone, fresher in spirit. One couldn't help thinking of the young Peter Hofmann, or Jonas Kaufmann in his early years. This first Parsifal will be certainly not be his last and if his star keeps rising it seems only inevitable that Bayreuth, always in need of new saviours, will invite him sooner or later (let's get that out of the way).

Sokolowski was surrounded by a strong cast: Albert Dohmen, the Wagner veteran, gave Gurnemanz, father abbot and unreliable narrator in one, the authority that this leading role demands of its interpreter. His narration sounded as if it had been carved from oak. Kartal Karagedik gave Amfortas a poignant intensity, with a voice and delivery full of pain and longing. Dshamilja Kaiser was a fascinating Kundry, but she was plagued, more than the other singers, by the almost total absence of an effective stage direction. The direction offered her little more than the opportunity to sing her lines, which she did with a rich, physical timbre that encompassed all aspects of her character but that did not save her Kundry from really coming to life. Werner Van Mechelen's Klingsor cut through the digital scenery with sharp articulation - a human curse in an inhuman world.

Welcome to the Vortex
The setting for the story of the Grail community is a kind of vortex: a world in which digital and physical reality converge. We see a kind of nativity scene behind which an almost inexhaustible amount of AI-generated images are projected. In the centre is Parsifal, sitting in an illuminated capsule, a kind of igloo, from which he observes the events. In the first act, he remains completely passive – we see the result of the swan he kills in hallucinatory AI: a creature with two heads and three legs, floating in a digital wasteland (apparently there was no time or budget for iteration in the prompt design).

The staging works best in the third act when Parsifal, like in a 1970s science fiction film, shoots through space and, on his way to enlightenment, sees the Hindu god Shiva and some Greek gods pass by. The religious manifests itself in various forms, not unusual in a Parsifal staging. This journey leads to the final scene in which Parsifal, now enlightened, ascends with his igloo. The saviour redeems himself and the world (the Grail community). Behind him, a dove flutters in AI kitsch. (Wieland Wagner would turn in his grave. At the insistence of Bayreuther Parsifal maestro Hans Knappertsbusch, he once reinstated the dove he had deliberately omitted from the final scene. But he did so in his own way: he had the bird appear so high up in the stage roof that only the conductor could see it; the audience did not see the animal. Wieland did not like to emphasise the obvious.)

Total theatre and the collapse of time
Kennedy and Selg's pursuit of a form of total theatre – in which sound, image, body, text and technology become one – could, on paper, tie in with the sacred, sensory dimension of Parsifal. Yet, when seeing the result, one's thoughts turn rather to other, more successful examples of total theatre, such as Bernd Alois Zimmermann's Die Soldaten, in which time is 'flattened': a theatre in which everything happens simultaneously, in which cause and effect disappear.

Such a concept could also work for Wagner. In his work, characters and their actions are never confined to the ‘now’. Flashbacks, flash-forwards and the present coexist. In Parsifal, the traditional theatre of action and psychological motive disappears. What remains is a mystical, process in which music and time coincide. When the action in the third act slows down to a near standstill, Wagner achieves a form of timelessness that is closer to meditation than to drama. A staging that successfully elaborates on this 'flattened time' should therefore not add more images or information, but rather remove them and create space for stillness and contemplation.

The AI-generated images, intended to blur the line between simulation and reality, often look like visuals from a video game from twenty years ago. The images come and go but rarely have any meaning. Jay Scheib's Parsifal in Bayreuth suffered from the same problem: new technology that conceals rather than reveals. One succumbs to the temptation to use new means as an end in themselves, while the real curiosity about the visual, about what images can add to music that is already so evocative in itself, is lacking.

Due to the continuous stream of images, Wagner's last opera gets lost in a pixelated landscape in which the sacred fades into decorative spectacle. Eventually, one wonders why the creators did not simply use stock videos and photos: they would have contributed just as much – or just as little – but would at least have been of better quality. Paradoxically, Kennedy and Selg's post-digital total theatre narrows the view: the AI reduces Wagner's universe to an aesthetic of the exterior – a screen that obscures the view of the inner world. 

This Parsifal-in-abundance was the opposite of the previous production of Wagner's last opera that Opera Vlaanderen presented. In 2013 and 2018, Tatjana Gürbaca provided Parsifal with a extreme austere staging by bathing an empty stage in bright white light for the duration of the entire opera. That was not ideal either, but at least her Parsifal was supported by ideas that she had formed about the work. That underlying layer of ideas seems to be absent here. 

Adolphe Appia and the innovation of opera staging
Parsifal was once a source of inspiration for real theatrical innovation. Adolphe Appia, who attended the premiere in Bayreuth in 1882, was completely mesmerised by it: he saw Wagner's work not as a sacred ritual, but as a blueprint for modern theatre - light, movement and architecture in harmony with music. Appia's vision led to some great revolutions of the 20th century: Edward Gordon Craig's symbolic spaces, Bertold Brecht's alienation, Robert Wilson's sculptural lighting.

Against this backdrop, Kennedy and Selg's digital images feel strangely conservative. GenAI is used in a clumsy way here; it is not a new language, but simply a brush with a manufacturing defect. A more innovation-oriented production would involve, for example, AI interacting with artists, responding to the orchestra and modulating its textures in real time. (Perhaps the AI Ring in Bayreuth next year can achieve something here – we await this with some reservation). 

Between transcendence and technology
Musically, this Parsifal is a triumph: warm, balanced, spiritually charged. Visually, it drowns in excess. With this tension between music and image – between transcendence and technology – this production is a true reflection of our times, in which the search for meaning in a world of excessive stimuli can be a challenge in itself. The accusation of excess would not have sounded strange to Wagner. After all, he was accused of the same thing: his music was said to overwhelm the senses and thereby paralyse the mind instead of uplifting it. As far as the latter is concerned, we could see that the visuals did indeed paralyse the mind at times, but the music uplifted it again, as always with a musically excellent performance of Parsifal. 

Alban Berg's Wozzeck, the first atonal opera in history, is among the most poignant and radical works in the operatic repertoire. No comforting melodies, no heroic arias -- but shrill dissonances and musical fragmentation. Berg's atonal sound language pushes the listener away, creates distance, even discomfort -- and yet that is precisely what brings us closer to Wozzeck. The pushing and pulling of the music creates room for empathy. For Wozzeck, for Marie, and for the child they will leave behind.

Wozzeck was once, a quarter of a century ago, the very first opera I saw live. For an entry-level opera, perhaps not the most obvious choice, but that lack of an opera past was perhaps also an advantage. I went in with an open mind, not knowing what to expect and, like the audience at the premiere in 1925, entered Neuland. It was a theatre experience that alienated, amazed and moved -- but above all, one that was fascinating enough to make me want to experience it again. Good art works on several levels. It impresses on first encounter and, as you delve into it, only gets more interesting.

Alban Berg’s Wozzeck is not an opera you passively undergo. It is a sonic assault, based on an unfinished play by Georg Büchner. A story of power, madness, humiliation, and the loss of humanity, carried by music that often seems to resist beauty itself.

Johan Simons is no stranger to Wozzeck, having directed Büchner’s play three times before. Simons is a director with a distinctive and recognizable style, marked by social engagement, aesthetic austerity, and psychologically charged acting. In his work, he often seeks the moral and human core of a text, stripping classic repertoire of excess romanticism or decorative frills. For Opera Vlaanderen, he now tackles Alban Berg’s opera for the first time. In his earlier productions of Büchner's Woyzeck, he avoided reducing his protagonist to mere victim or perpetrator, people become perpetrators because they are victims he apparently wants to say, and here too he zooms in not on individual guilt, but on a world in which human dignity is fragile.

Simons situates the protagonist’s mental decline within a scenography that makes Wozzeck’s psychological space tangible. The stage is bathed in light — a white space with fragmented walls that don’t connect, like a labyrinth with no center, an institution with no escape. Light projections and subtle shifts suggest the walls are moving, as if Wozzeck lives in a world slowly slipping off its axis. In this clinical white environment — both open stage and closed sanatorium — the boundary between reality and delusion is extremely blurred. Everything becomes internal experience. A stage image as a mental state: a frozen psychosis in light and line. A story of spiritual darkness unfolds on a stage that, through its brightness, feels all the more oppressive.

From the very first scene — Wozzeck smearing himself with blood, as if Marie’s murder has already happened — it’s clear we’re witnessing a tragedy waiting to unfold. This is not a spontaneous descent into madness, but a predestined collapse, a logical consequence of a merciless world that leaves no space for someone like Wozzeck. “Der Mensch ist ein Abgrund” the title character says — and in Simons’ direction, the abyss, along with the characters and their flaws, is brought palpably close. The audience is granted a glimpse into that abyss — and, as every good abyss should, it stares back.

Simons presents the story with simple, direct images. As often in his work, anecdote is absent: he abstracts, distills. For the climax — Marie’s murder — he opts for a theatrically sublimated image. No blood, despite its abundance in the rest of the performance, and no physical depiction of violence. This somewhat mutes the dramatic peak, making the tragedy less a sum of what preceded it. That scene could have been a bit more confrontational.

Notably, the children — who in the libretto appear only at the end — are given a place on stage from the beginning. Here, they serve as silent commentary: a mute Greek chorus, the future observing the wreckage of the present. They react but do not act. This adds a reflective layer to the performance and places the adult world under a magnifying glass of childlike wonder and helplessness. Their presence makes Wozzeck’s world all the more harrowing, but also offers a hint of hope. Simons has stated that he hopes the audience leaves with a heavy heart. That he succeeds is a testament to the production — and yet, thanks to the children, a touch of solace sneaks in. A suggestion that, despite everything, a future is possible that doesn't resemble the present.

The title role finds a sublime interpreter in Robin Adams. Adams makes Wozzeck a real Mensch: broken and anxious but not without humor, a three-dimensional character. His performance is raw, impassioned, and deeply felt. Adams stood out even within a strong cast.

Marie, sung by Magdalena Anna Hofmann, is also a figure living on society’s margins. She has an illegitimate child, is supported by Wozzeck who gives her money from time to time, and seeks something resembling life in the arms of the Drum Major. Hofmann portrays her as a woman full of longing, pride, and despair. Unlike Wozzeck, she clings to life. Her voice — powerful enough for Isolde or Brünnhilde — crawls through Berg’s score like through a funnel: a monumental force that penetrates musical fabric with razor-sharp focus. She, too, is an abyss — but one that fights against her own depths.

Opposing this dramatic gravity are grotesque supporting roles that, despite their cruelty, offer some comic relief. James Kryshak’s Captain and Martin Winkler’s Doctor are caricatures in an absurd nightmare — cold, ludicrous figures of power whose indifference only deepens Wozzeck’s disorientation. Samuel Sakker, meanwhile, makes the Drum Major a convincingly egomaniacal seducer.
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The orchestra, under the baton of Alejo Pérez, delivers a tour de force. The sound is robust, uncompromising, but also rich in color and nuance. The brass section in particular are having the time of their lives. They push themselves gaudily forward in the orchestral sound. They are like shadows closing in around the characters, roaring, whispering and shuddering through a sound world that is like an expressionist painting in sound. And under Pérez's direction, everything in that painting, from screaming colours with the broad brush to the fractal structures of the pencil, takes on its weight.

Opera Vlaanderen deserves high praise for programming — after Luigi Nono’s Intolleranza — yet another 20th-century masterpiece that scrapes, stings, and confronts (perhaps only Die Soldaten by Bernd Alois Zimmermann could have ended the opera season more explosively). Wozzeck is not a comforting piece, but a revealing one — an opera that forces insight. A work that, in a strong staging like this, will haunt the mind for days. Next year, Opera Vlaanderen ends the season with Carmen — another opera about a jealous man who kills a woman, but one with which it’s perhaps easier to ease into summer. That final observation, it should be clear, is by no means a suggestion to avoid Wozzeck. The lover of passionate theater and intense musical drama knows what to do: head to Antwerp or Ghent, where this magnificent production runs until the end of the month.

She may not have a shadow, but she certainly has great music. Massive, lush, and luxurious (Gurre-Lieder, eat your heart out!). Die Frau ohne Schatten is not Strauss’s best opera—its storyline is too unbalanced for that—but it is arguably the opera into which he poured some of his finest music. At the Dutch National Opera, the first three rows of seats had to be removed to make space for the 130-piece orchestra. Their sacrifice was not in vain.

Katie Mitchell’s new production of Richard Strauss’s Die Frau ohne Schatten is a bold, gripping, and unapologetically modern reinterpretation of a notoriously complex opera. Instead of the traditional fairy-tale setting, Mitchell opts, in her own words, for a “feminist sci-fi thriller.” She presents a version stripped of ornamentation, with clear narrative focus and heightened emotional intensity—without entirely sacrificing the dreamlike character that defines the work.

Mitchell is a theatre-maker with a distinctly activist edge. A self-declared feminist—more relevant than ever in an era of mounting threats to women’s rights—she lives and works according to her principles. For instance, she refuses to fly for ecological reasons and is known for her radical reworkings of classic texts. While she is praised for the urgency and vision that define her work, she has also faced criticism for “butchering” classical works rather than interpreting them.

At the heart of Die Frau ohne Schatten lies a multilayered, metaphysical narrative, inspired by Goethe's Faust, Mozart’s Zauberflöte, and mythical archetypes—an opera full of spirits, royalty, moral trials, and a symbolic search for humanity and for what makes a woman a woman (namely, her fertility). It is not a story that demands rational clarity; rather, it unfolds through a kind of dream-logic where symbolism and emotional intuition outweigh cause and effect. But Mitchell deliberately chooses rationality and structure. She constructs a tight, psychologically coherent framework around the story and introduces a “realism” that some may find too reductive or alienating-certainly those attached to the mystical, open structure of the original. But for me, it worked. Her clarity brought structure and emotional focus to a story that often remains nebulous and diffuse.

Her greatest achievement may be how she transforms the opera’s mystical vagueness into something psychologically tangible. By staging a "realistic", sometimes clinical world—complete with movements in slow-motion (a technique she also employed in her production of George Benjamin’s Lessons in Love and Violence)—she draws out the cinematic quality of Strauss’s orchestral interludes. It often felt like watching a series or movie.

One of Mitchell’s strongest choices was to stage the otherwise invisible Keikobad (the king of the spirit-world) as a silent character. With his gazelle head, long black coat, and slow, controlled movements, he became a disturbing presence—a silent, looming force that haunted the action. The use of animal masks frequently evoked David Lynch’s Inland Empire. A film, with its potent scenes embedded in an overall sense of disorientation, that had in common with this production that the things that remained diffuse and unclear (and there were still quite a few of them, despite Mitchell's dissection of the libretto) did not get in the way of an immersive viewing and listening experience.

Not all her choices convinced. Keikobad’s henchmen pointing guns at everyone at nearly every moment was a heavy-handed reminder that all action occurred under coercion. It became gratuitous. Likewise, the scenes where these henchmen shot characters who had outlived their narrative usefulness felt forced and overly literal. In those moments, Mitchell’s tight direction tipped into overstatement.

In her dark reinterpretation of the opera’s ending, Mitchell again deviates from Hofmannsthal’s libretto (good—the ending is arguably its weakest point). Where the original veers toward a forced, hollow reconciliation, Mitchell opts for a somber, oppressive close. The dream doesn’t end in triumph, but in exhaustion. It’s a daring but effective choice. The audience left the theatre under a moon of melancholy, with grateful minds.

Setting aside the staging and direction, Die Frau ohne Schatten is, above all, a triumph of music. Conductor Marc Albrecht and the Netherlands Philharmonic Orchestra made a passionate and magnificent case for this being perhaps Strauss’s most ambitious score. In this music, the erotic tension of Salome, the visceral impact of Elektra (Keikobad’s leitmotif clearly references Agamemnon’s), and the illustrative brilliance of Der Rosenkavalier all meet. Amid the sumptuous orchestration lie intimate, chamber-like moments of stunning beauty. One of those was delivered by guest cellist Floris Mijnders, brought in especially from the Munich Philharmonic. With mournful lyricism, he cut through the orchestral density to remarkable effect.
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In that orchestral storm—which rarely erupts into full tutti but instead pulses with constant undercurrents—the singers had to hold their ground, and by and large, they did. The voices of Aušrinė Stundytė (Die Färberin) and Michaela Schuster (Die Amme) may have lost some lyrical sheen over the years, but both singers brought depth and conviction to their roles. Their characters came to life with an emotional intensity well-matched to Mitchell’s psychological approach.

In the cast, Josef Wagner stood out. His portrayal of Barak, the husband of Die Färberin, was warm, strong, and lyrical—a role he gave emotional depth and gravitas. AJ Glueckert was a solid Emperor, the husband of the woman searching for her shadow. Daniela Köhler, a seasoned Strauss and Wagner soprano, took on the Empress—the titular woman without a shadow—with dramatic command. Whatever she lacked in vocal expressiveness, she made up for in a portrayal that convincingly conveyed her character’s inner struggle. A subtle but striking element was the children’s choir, who sang the voices of the unborn children. Hidden from view, their voices echoed like whispers from another world—worthy of a horror film.
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For me, Katie Mitchell’s direction of Frau ohne Schatten achieved what good Regietheater should: it opened up a classic opera to a new audience—not by simplifying it, but by illuminating it from a contemporary, and perhaps unexpected, angle. With powerful imagery, psychological depth, and orchestral brilliance that outshone everything, this production was an ideal entry point into one of the most enigmatic masterpieces of the twentieth century. It made me curious about the DNO production from 2008—a colorful, fairy-tale version staged by Andreas Homoki.

​Mozart’s Idomeneo, re di Creta (1781) marks a significant moment in his development as an opera composer. Commissioned by the Munich court, it was an opportunity for the young Mozart to showcase his talent in the prestigious genre of opera seria — a genre already considered somewhat outdated at the time, but one he sought to revitalize with innovative musical ideas. Idomeneo combines the formal grandeur of Gluck and the Italian tradition with Mozart’s own emerging sensitivity to human psychology and orchestral refinement. The work is ambitious, it experiments (over half a century before Wagner!) with the through-composed operatic form, it’s dramatically versatile, and musically rich — though not without structural problems. Giambattista Varesco’s libretto is uneven, the action occasionally illogical, and even Mozart struggled to create a coherent whole. Still, Idomeneo remains one of his most fascinating operas: complex and forward-thinking, yet dramaturgically fragile.

​In collaboration with Japanese visual artist Chiharu Shiota, choreographer Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui transformed the stage for Idomeneo into a web of long red threads, physically connecting singers, dancers, and actors to one another and to the set. It’s a visually striking concept: these threads make visible the underlying relationships and ties of fate, reminiscent of an extended Norn scene — threads of destiny, threads of memory.
 
Cherkaoui’s choreographic background is unmistakable in every scene. In opera, there is often a great deal of time when characters are on stage but not singing or directly involved in the action. What do you do with that time? It's an interesting question. Many opera productions suffer from stiff stage direction, with characters who are present but visibly lost when they have nothing to sing.

​In Cherkaoui’s direction, dancers and singers form a moving chorus that provides commentary on the action through choreography. The result is a staging that breathes visually, one that feels pulsing and alive. But this constant movement has its downside. While the dance is meaningful at first, it gradually loses focus and dramatic strength. At times, the production becomes more of an "exercise in movement" — beautiful to watch, but with a cloying aftertaste, as if something essential is missing: intensity, tension, sharpness. This feeling is reinforced by the sense that the onstage drama is often sublimated rather than embodied — the ballet smooths over where it should cut deep.
 
Musically, the evening brought mixed results. Cecilia Molinari (Idamante) and Anna El-Khashem (Ilia) delivered strong and nuanced performances. Daniel Behle as Idomeneo was solid, though he audibly struggled with his “applause” aria — the virtuosity that should give the aria its brilliance was lacking. Perhaps it’s simply not one of Mozart’s strongest pieces. Even in Nicolai Gedda’s version on Colin Davis's live recording — one of my favorite Mozart opera recordings — I find little to enjoy in it. Jacquelyn Wagner as Elettra was disappointing; her portrayal remained flat, whereas Elettra’s fury should be one of the opera’s expressive highlights.

​The ending Cherkaoui devised for Idomeneo was one in the tradition of Lars von Trier — a forcibly dramatic conclusion in which, contrary to the libretto, Idamante and Ilia are killed by Idomeneo. It made no sense. The entire opera follows Idomeneo’s anxiety for his son’s safety. He tries everything to avoid sacrificing him to Neptune, even offering himself in his place. And when Neptune finally offers a way out — relinquishing his crown to Idamante in exchange for the boy’s life — Idomeneo instead murders both Idamante and his beloved Ilia. Again, it makes no sense. Deviations from what the libretto and music communicate must still maintain a relationship with them. An alternative interpretation can challenge or even contradict the original intent, but it must remain emotionally and dramatically grounded — you can’t simply erase the text.

This Idomeneo is visually enchanting and at times musically glowing, but ultimately lacks the dramatic edge and emotional core that can truly bring the opera to life. The red threads stretched across the stage make many things visible but don’t always manage to move. What remains is an elegant, aesthetic production that intrigues but doesn’t cut very deep — a work of art you admire, but don’t fully feel.

IDOMENEO, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart / Dutch National Opera, 20 February 2026

Conductor Laurence Cummings
Netherlands Chamber Orchestra
Director and Choreographer Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui
Set Design Chiharu Shiota
 
Idomeneo Daniel Behle
Idamante Cecilia Molinari
Ilia Anna El-Khashem
Elettra Jacquelyn Wagner
Arbace Linard Vrielink
 
Chorus of Dutch National Opera
Dancers of Eastman
 
A co-production with Grand Théâtre de Genève and Grand Théâtre de Luxembourg