Word: sellarsization
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Mozart wanted even his darkest operas to end with the characters reconciled and order restored, and so he followed the fiery disappearance of Don Giovanni with a cheery little sextet in which the survivors tell everyone to mend his ways. Sellars' contemporary sensibility seems unable to accept such a stylized...
Just as Sellars' transfer of Don Giovanni to a phantasmagorical Spanish Harlem really tells us very little about Harlem, it also tells us nothing new about Don Giovanni. There have been so many changes in plot and character that Giovanni is no longer Mozart's defiant hero but a quite...
This tormented sensibility also afflicts Sellars' gloomy version of Cosi. It is full of visual gags (the two heroes pretending to go to war are waved on by crowds carrying signs such as BURN THE SUPREME COURT), but it has very little of Mozart's cynical vivacity. The plot derives...
...deft and scrupulous conducting of Craig Smith, and so it is a pleasure to find that Sellars has pretty much left the performers alone in one of the three operas, Figaro. The setting in the Trump Tower is no more than a mild gag, not another excuse for wholesale Sellarsization. Donald Trump does not appear from behind a bush. The singers just sing, and sing beautifully. What a relief...
Don Giovanni in Spanish Harlem? Figaro in Trump Tower? Why? A skeptical view of Peter Sellars' zany productions of three Mozart-Da Ponte works.