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Product Description
BBC Music Magazine
The Belgian Philippe Boesmans's second opera Reigen, based upon Arthur Schnitzler's play, was one of the operatic hits of the Nineties, which has already been seen in a variety of productions across Europe, and his most recent stage work Wintermärchen, premiered at La Monnaie in Brussels in December 1999 (whence this recording), has begun to travel too. It is a product of the same team that produced Reigen - Luc Bondy had a hand in fashioning the libretto from Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale and also directed the premiere, Antonio Pappano conducts again - while Boesman's music continues along the path of stylistic synthesis that had been a feature of the earlier work too.
In Wintermärchen, though, the music is even more breathless and eclectic: scenes tumble over each other at top speed, the vocal lines veer between Berg and Sondheim, and the orchestra alludes to a vast historical spectrum of styles, with a prominent role for the accordion. The big jolt occurs between the second and third acts, when the action moves from Sicily to Bohemia and forward by 16 years; the text switches from German to English, and an improvising jazz-rock trio, Aka Moon, is introduced to signal a new world. But it all seems too schematic and contrived, and even though the final act returns to the world of the opening, it cannot measure up to the wonderful epiphany of Shakespeare's play.
Performance *****
Sound ****
© BBC Music Magazine 2001
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
5.0 out of 5 stars (1 customer review)
4 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Iceman Cometh, 25 Aug 2004
By Kris De Ruysscher "Kris De Ruysscher" - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Boesmans: Wintermärchen (Audio CD)
Thank God the operahouses are still standing! If it were up to Pierre Boulez and his angry mob of mathematicians they'd all be burnt to the ground and we'd be talking in codes, wear grey suits and intellectualise endlessly about the beauty of the number "5".
Philippe Boesmans used to be a mathematician (by which I mean serial composers unable to express anything else but systems - very few composers made music using the serial principle: in fact only Berg, Webern, Stravinsky and a handful of others bent the rules and made music). But starting in the early eighties, he developed a style of his own, resulting in modern-day masterpieces of contemporary opera. La Passion de Gilles and Reigen were created at the Théâtre de la Monnaie/De Munt in Brussels, once the centre of modern opera. Reigen especially conquered Europe (no mean fact these days!) and Wintermärchen, the follow-up did even better. I won't delve into the plot, it's Shakespeare so you know what to expect. But the music... is beautiful. There's Mozart, Strauss, Debussy, Bartók, and Berg, but mostly Boesmans. It's lyrical (yes, indeed, aria's), delightfully contemporary, tonal, atonal, rhythmic, there's even a part with jazz avant garde.
If your taste buds can take no more than Don Giovanni, this is for you: Wintermärchen is Mozart ressurected (but beware: it's not a pastiche at all). If the edge of the world is just the beginning of a new one to you, then this CD is for you too: no-one blends tradition and vision into such a deceptively complex whole as Boesmans.
For all opera-fans.
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