Structures and Surfaces

Anyone hoping for a traditional Faust would have been very disappointed. Philipp Stölzl’s glossy new staging of Gounod’s much-loved opera – the Deutsche Oper’s final new production of the season – featured plenty of high-concept, lots of flashing lights, some bumper cars, and one of the creepiest choirs ever to appear on an opera-house stage. It was also, in its own peculiar way, quite affecting, and it certainly did no disservice to an evening which also featured a number of distinguished vocal performances, as well as some of the most luxurious playing to emerge from the pit of the Deutsche Oper in recent memory. Gounod himself supervised several different versions of Faust in his lifetime and, during the past century and a half, the structure and content of the work has always remained somewhat in flux. The version performed on this…