Stage director β Polly Graham. Wiener Staatsoper, Vienna, Austria. Saturday, December 14th, With this new opera, premiered just last week at the Wiener Staatsoper, Olga Neuwirth and her librettist Catherine Filloux made history. Orlando is the first opera written by a woman to be performed on the main stage of this venerable institution.
The weight of history is heavy, especially in Austria, and the need to make a real statement to rewrite the centuries of wrong, in the space of three and a quarter hours, must have been exceptionally demanding. However I left the theatre tonight with a question, does Orlando work as a cogent musical-dramatic experience? The answer, for this spectator, is that Orlando as it currently stands is an audacious, ambitious and assured piece of musical writing.
But it also felt that it tried to do too much. Yes, this is a work that creates a real step forward for this institution, bringing it literally kicking and screaming into the twenty-first century. The second, imagines what might have happened had Woolf lived until today. They also brought up s counterculture, with a band on stage featuring electric guitars, a drum kit and a Hammond organ. The first half was very austere, visual interest provided by screens at the back of the stage offering random imagery, as well as a live-action camera offering close-ups of Orlando.
The chorus was marched on and off, singing their music from tablet computers. In the second half, the screens took on more colour. With the full resources of the house at her disposal, Neuwrirth uses an enormous orchestra. The score is exceptionally well crafted, revealing an extraordinary ear for sound.
Neuwirth, and her sound designers, skilfully manage to echo the chorus and orchestra, with resonances emerging from the chandelier, bathing the house in a glow of sound. The fact that the strings were tuned a quarter-tone below the rest, leaving us with a perturbed sense of not having a tonal anchor, was ingenious.
