Enjoy your Nutcracker this season, but me, I’d much rather have the other part of the double-bill with which the ballet was first paired in 1892: the one-act fairy-tale opera Iolanta.
I’m currently admiring Peter Sellars’s enlightening interpretation, paired on DVD with Stravinsky’s Perséphone from a production at the Teatro Real.
“It is a very radical opera, it is the start of symbolism in Russia, of modern art, of the search for light,” says Peter Sellars in an interview for El País.
Iolanta was Tchaikovsky’s very last opera and suffered from terrible bowdlerization under Soviet authorities. A new production starring Anna Netrebko — in a double-bill with Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle and directed by Mariusz Trelinski — comes to the Met early in 2015.
Filed under: directors, Metropolitan Opera, Tchaikovsky
MEMETERIA by Thomas May 