cupure logo
reviewfanscowboycartershowcowboy carterlondon2025starfestival

The Flying Dutchman review – terrific cast and hurtling momentum in OHP’s first ever Wagner

Opera Holland Park, LondonJulia Burbach’s blurs the lines of reality and illusion in an impressive new staging of Wagner’s horror story that hits more than it misses. Musically it is very fine indeedOpera Holland Park opens this year’s season with a new production of The Flying Dutchman, directed by Julia Burbach and conducted by Peter Selwyn. The company’s first ever Wagner staging, it aims high and doesn’t always succeed, though the best of it, both musically and theatrically, is unquestionably impressive.Burbach essentially stages it as a psychological horror story (which it is), making Eleanor Dennis’s Senta the central protagonist rather than Paul Carey Jones’s charismatic Dutchman, and heightening the opera’s sense of the uncanny by blurring the lines between reality and illusion as she dreams of escaping the normative confines of the world around her. Continue reading...

Comments

Culture