Tales of oppression and resistance

The undoubted highlight of the Deutsche Oper’s Meyerbeer cycle from a few years back was Le Prophète, a production that used the conventions of grand opéra as the springboard for a sprawling, surprisingly modern revolutionary epic. Five years later Olivier Py, the director of that production, has returned to the Deutsche Oper for a new production of Les Vêpres Siciliennes in its original French-language version. The opera, which Verdi wrote specifically for the Parisian stage and which was modelled to some extent on the grand scale of Meyerbeer’s greatest successes – it even features a libretto by Eugène Scribe, albeit a recycled one – allowed Mr Py similar scope to present a vast canvas of oppression and resistance. With the addition of several great vocal performances and the taut musical direction of Enrique Mazzola, the production…