Don Carlos – Operaen, Det KGL Teater
There are different versions of Verdi’s masterpiece about love and duty with director Davide Livermore’s new production drawing on the 1884 Milan version, performed in Italian, which jettisons the original’s scene-setting first act, and relies upon strong performances from the cast to move the production along, which it gets here in droves.
It's a tough story with far too real parallels to ongoing events in the Ukraine and Middle East which serves to reinforce the piece’s uncompromising assessment of the ways of human nature as we are thrust via a love triangle into a courtly world, although not 16th Century Spain here, but rather that of the Franco era, emboldened by costume designer Mariana Fracasso, and to which the principles of religious Inquisition and destructive suppression of p...