Greek tragedy has been an essential ingredient of opera since the time of Monteverdi; yet if Rameau, Gluck or Strauss essentially refashioned the tales of Euripides and Aeschylus to suit the dramatic conventions of their own eras, Hans Werner Henze’s The Bassarids seems to have been an attempt to tap into the ritualistic strangeness of ancient theatre itself. The opera, an adaptation of the Bacchae of Euripides, opened the Komische Oper’s current season in a new production by Barrie Kosky that seized on the work’s alien austerity; with two powerful leads, focussed musical direction from Vladimir Jurowski and the impressive choral presence of Vocalconsort Berlin, it was a compelling modern journey into one of the ancient world’s most ambiguous tragedies.
Mr Kosky was determined never to let us forget that we were in a theatre: when the…
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