Austria Salzburg Competition 2025 [9] – Vivaldi/ Ovid, Lodge Metamorphosis: Soloists, Il Canto di Orfeo refrain, Les Musiciens du Prince – Monaco / Gianluca Capuano (conductor). Recorded stay (directed by Tiziano Mancini) on the Haus für Mozart, Salzburg, June 2025 and seen on arte.television.
United States Numerous, Orgy & Bess: Deep Throats and Excessive Notes: Soloists, Band, Heartbeat Opera. Judson Memorial Church, New York, 31.10.2025. (ES-S)
At reverse ends of the operatic spectrum – a minimum of when it comes to sources – two latest productions reimagined how the artwork kind can remodel itself. In Salzburg, Barrie Kosky’s Lodge Metamorphosis – which I noticed final week in its arte.television broadcast model – turned Vivaldi’s Baroque idiom and Ovid’s myths right into a lavish meditation on want and loss. In New York, on Halloween evening and simply steps from the parade, Heartbeat Opera’s Orgy & Bess dismantled Porgy and Bess by drag, parody and irreverence. One handled metamorphosis as introspection, the opposite as revolt. One reveled in full orchestral sound with refrain, a ballet corps and a few of right this moment’s foremost Baroque singers, the opposite within the glittering chaos of cabaret, performed out on a small stage with a quartet of instrumentalists beside it. But each shared a perception that opera endures solely by shedding its pores and skin and discovering new our bodies to inhabit.
Kosky’s manufacturing, conceived with dramaturg Olaf A. Schmitt, revives the Baroque follow of the pasticcio – a collage of arias, ensembles and instrumental interludes – whereas anchoring it in a single area: a modern, impersonal lodge room designed by Michael Levine. From this room, framed by rocafilm’s video projections that dissolved partitions into shade, texture and fable, Ovid’s tales unfold as a sequence of desires and delusions, each a meditation on change and longing. The actress Angela Winkler, as an aged Orpheus haunted by reminiscence, narrates the tales in German – a continuing presence whose voice bridges the 5 episodes drawn from ‘Pygmalion’, ‘Arachne’, ‘Myrrha’, ‘Echo and Narcissus’ and ‘Eurydice’. The idea may need risked fragmentation, but Kosky’s management of rhythm, tone and picture made the night really feel uncannily cohesive – half mythic pageant, half psychodrama and wholly operatic in its depth.
Throughout the tales’ unifying, impersonal, lodge room setting, Kosky and his collaborators revealed an astonishing vary of theatrical invention. The room appeared alive: doorways opened and closed on their very own, beds swallowed singers complete and partitions flickered with rocafilm’s projections that shifted from what appeared reproductions of Baroque-like work illustrating the underlying myths to dissolving abstractions. In the meantime Klaus Bruns’s costumes moved fluidly between modern and mythic-evoking registers. Regardless of the doubtless constraining stage area, every story discovered a definite visible language – the digital avatars of Arachne’s contest with Minerva, the mirror duet of Narcissus and his double, the mattress that devoured Myrrha in disgrace. Within the closing transformation, the whole room rose to disclose the underworld the place Eurydice’s voice, suspended between love and oblivion, introduced the cycle to its shut. Otto Pichler’s choreography for a small ensemble of dancers prolonged that sense of metamorphosis into motion – from the stylized, virtually mechanical gestures of Pygmalion’s statue to the grotesque bacchanal surrounding Narcissus. Kosky’s path balanced irony and empathy, permitting fable, dance and want to merge in tableaux that felt each intimate and dreamlike.
Gianluca Capuano’s musical path, carefully aligned with the manufacturing’s conceptual design, gave coherence to Kosky’s collage of myths. Main Les Musiciens du Prince – Monaco and the Il Canto di Orfeo refrain, he formed Vivaldi’s arias and instrumental fragments with a dramatic sensibility that mirrored the fixed flux of the staging. The rating breathed with the identical elasticity because the imagery – shifting between rhythmic precision and expressive freedom – and Capuano’s consideration to rhetorical contour gave the music each urgency and readability. Cecilia Bartoli as Eurydice and as Arachne, commanded the stage with a mix of precision and abandon: her ‘Armatae face et anguibus’ (Juditha triumphans) blazed with defiant fury in Arachne’s contest, answered by Nadezhda Karyazina’s imperious ‘Se lento ancora il fulmine’ (Argippo) as Minerva. The closing ‘Gelido in ogni vena’ (Farnace) turned a imaginative and prescient of frozen grief. Philippe Jaroussky as Pygmalion and Narcissus introduced refinement and pathos, shaping ‘Gemo in un punto e fremo’ (L’Olimpiade) with inward delicacy even when the instrument itself has darkened. A youthful Lea Desandre, floating across the stage with radiant poise but totally grounded in character, reaffirmed her place amongst right this moment’s most pure Vivaldi interpreters, luminous in timbre and alert to dramatic nuance, spinning coloratura strains of dazzling precision in ‘Agitata da due venti’ (La Griselda) as Myrrha.
Lodge Metamorphosis often included hints of Kosky’s penchant for satire and cabaret-like irony. Arachne’s duel with Minerva turned a trend media circus, full with paparazzi flashes. Within the Narcissus episode, a surreal pas de deux performed out between two near-identical masked male dancers in white underwear mirroring one another like nightclub doubles.
Orgy & Bess: Deep Throats and Excessive Notes pushed these impulses to their fullest expression. Heartbeat Opera’s tenth anniversary ‘drag-opera extravaganza’, created by co-founder Ethan Heard and creative director Jacob Ashworth, compressed the grand narratives of the operatic canon into the glittering intimacy of Judson Memorial Church. What in Salzburg unfolded in an enormous orchestral and choreographic panorama was right here refracted by a handful of singers, a four-piece band and the anarchic humor of drag. But the purpose was not parody for its personal sake – Orgy & Bess used extra, camp and self-exposure as devices of critique, asking what sorts of our bodies and voices opera has historically celebrated or excluded.
Like Kosky’s Lodge Metamorphosis, Orgy & Bess was additionally a type of pasticcio – a collage of operatic and theatrical fragments, from Porgy and Bess to Turandot, from Lucia di Lammermoor to Pagliacci, from Carmina Burana to Handel’s Samson – stitched collectively by Dan Schlosberg’s witty re-orchestrations for a jazz-cabaret ensemble.
Below the path of Ethan Heard and Jacob Ashworth, Porgy and Bess served extra as a touchstone than a literal narrative. The present borrowed its emotional framework – love, loss, racial and sexual oppression – however exploded it right into a collection of drag vignettes that combined Gershwin’s themes with arias and well-liked numbers from throughout the canon. Bess, as a central determine, encountered different ‘operatic queens’, every representing archetypes of want or tragedy, remodeled into expressions of freedom and self-invention. Bess is now not the sinner hooked on ‘completely satisfied mud’ however a lady who claims the multiplicity of her needs. Cio-Cio-San, lengthy trapped in opera’s fantasy of self-sacrificing devotion, was remodeled right into a sufferer able to embrace spectacle, her sacrifice staged as irony slightly than submission. And Lucia di Lammermoor, now not a passive madwoman, turned her delirium into liberation – coloratura reimagined because the sound and gestures of revolt.
The small ensemble – sporting make-up and Valkyrian helmets – beneath violinist Ashworth’s path moved fluidly between Gershwin’s swing rhythms and the stylized pulse of opera. Bernard Holcomb’s Bess mixed vocal energy with theatrical adaptability, his baritone reshaped by falsetto and speech right into a vocabulary of emotional extremes. Round him, costumed as extravagantly – and completely suited to a Halloween evening – by David Quinn, sopranos Angela Yam (Cio-Cio-San) and Jamilyn Manning (Lucia), mezzo-soprano Sishel Claverie (within the many-faced Pants Position) and John Taylor Ward (because the Patroness) shaped a shifting refrain of a number of characters and commentators: arguing, conspiring or standing in sudden solidarity. Every vignette turned a burst of theater in miniature, performed not for polish however for immediacy – music as an act of reinvention and self-exposure.
Amongst these shifting figures, John Taylor Ward’s Patroness provided the night’s slyest transformation. At first a parody of operatic authority – powdered, imperious, visibly appalled by the desecration of custom – she turned a determine of sudden complicity. Because the vignettes grew wilder, the Patroness slowly shed her hauteur, becoming a member of within the spectacle she had as soon as so strongly condemned. Her closing gestures prompt that acceptance, too, generally is a type of metamorphosis – an acknowledgment, very similar to the one embodied by Barrie Kosky and Olaf A. Schmitt’s conception of Lodge Metamorphosis, that artwork survives not by acts of preservation however by an infinite capability for change – its oldest, and maybe nonetheless most crucial, act of religion.
Edward Sava-Segal
Featured Picture: A scene from Lodge Metamophosis © SF/Monika Rittershaus
Lodge Metamorphosis
Manufacturing:
Texts – Ovid
German translation – Hermann Heiser
Association – Barrie Kosky and Olaf A. Schmitt
Director – Barrie Kosky
Dramaturgy – Olaf A. Schmitt
Units – Michael Levine
Costumes – Klaus Bruns
Lighting – Franck Evin
Video – rocafilm
Choreography – Otto Pichler
Forged:
Orpheus (spoken position) – Angela Winkler
Eurydice / Arachne – Cecilia Bartoli
Pygmalion / Narcissus – Philippe Jaroussky
Statua / Myrrha / Echo – Lea Desandre
Minerva / Juno / Nutrice – Nadezhda Karyazina
Orgy & Bess: Deep Throats and Excessive Notes
Manufacturing:
Creation – Ethan Heard & Jacob Ashworth
Script & new English lyrics – Ethan Heard, Peregrine Heard & Jacob Ashworth
New association – Dan Schlosberg
Director – Ethan Heard
Co-Music administrators – Jacob Ashworth & Dan Schlosberg
Costumes – David Quinn
Choreographer & Assistant director – Dylan Cole
Forged:
Bess – Bernard Holcomb
Cio-Cio-San – Angela Yam
Lucia – Jamilyn Manning
The Patroness – John Taylor Ward
Pants Position – Sishel Claverie
