Richard Wagner: Das Rheingold
(2007)by the flashy futurist Spanish troupe La Fura dels Baus created for Santiago Calatrava's futurist recent opera house, Palau de les Arts Reina Sofia.
With Zubin Mehta in musical direction, the Fura has shown that today tetralología Wagner can be understood, first as suicidal degradation of nature, a technical man's hands, as have a place where destructive spiral of war, genocide and the irrational exploitation of natural resources.
Source: La Fura dels Baus website
I was most interested to see this Rheingold again, since this production by the Catalan theatre company La Fura dels Baus had excited my attention when it was first performed and I wanted to discover the extent that my initial surprise had been part of my appreciation of it. On seeing it again, I still consider that La Fura's Rheingold is the best work of their four stagings. La Fura has shown great creative imagination in many of their operas so far and they have proved their abilities once again with a genuinely original conception that makes great use of video projections.
La Fura's main idea is to show how the conflicting ambitions of the Gods, the giants and the Nibelungs, upset a natural equilibrium between their worlds and those of men and lead inexorably to their self-destruction. There is a formal set only in the opening scene which shows a metallic platform with three small glass box full of water suspended above it in which the Rhine Maidens swim. In the following scenes the sets disappear completely, replaced by a large screen on which extremely original and allusive images to the drama are projected: particularly interesting for Wotan and Loge's descent to Nibelheim and the production and handling of the gold. Having seen it twice now, I am convinced that the production will actually be even better on DVD, since it often seems that the production has been deliberately developed around the idea that the screened images are more important than any other kind of theatrical effects.
(José M Irurzun)
Source: MusicWeb
Reading
Links
- La Fura dels Baus on YouTube
- Carlus Padrissa on YouTube
- La Fura dels Baus Rheingold in the movie theaters (Los Angeles Times)
- Wagner: Rheingold (staged by La Fura dels Baus) on DVD
- Wagner: Die Walküre (staged by La Fura dels Baus) on DVD
- Wagner: Siegfried (staged by La Fura dels Baus) on DVD
- Wagner: Götterdämmerung (staged by La Fura dels Baus) on DVD