Ekaterina Gubanova
Theatrical genius, Tannhauser, Bayreuth Festival
How can it be that your preconceptions of a production based on just seeing some performance photography can get it all so, so wrong? Theoretically, this production of Tannhauser for Wagner’s Festspielhaus should have been just what I loathe in contemporary stagings: merging actual performance with live video and pre-recordings, waving wokism in your face,…
A doubly surreal Parsifal, Bayreuth Festival
This new Parsifal for Bayreuth was really two productions: one for the small number of us with Augmented Reality glasses and the second for the vast majority of the audience without. While the embracing of whatever technology enhanced his own work was a hallmark of Richard Wagner, I doubt if he would have enjoyed this…