AKHNATEN • BERLIN
★★★★★★
Photo: Monika Rittershaus
REVIEW AKHNATEN: PHILIP GLASS BARRIE KOSKY TRIUMPH IN BERLIN
Hypnotizing montages of techno-classical avant-garde music frame spectacular stage images in über-delicate set designs and stunning mass choreography. ‘The One and Only’ Barrie Kosky once again delivers a hit performance at the Komische Oper in Berlin.
Philip Glass’ breathtaking modern opera/dance fusion Akhnaten is a wild experience at the Schillertheater in Berlin, where master director Barrie Kosky has momentarily abandoned his burlesque signature and indulged in visual, super-aesthetic pleasure. A completely sold-out theatre witnesses a spectacular performance.
Photo: Monika Rittershaus
The music is pure repetitive composition, with homogeneous musical figures in long, fluctuating planes, with roaring choral movements and beautifully costumed soloists in an impressive lighting design.
An accomplished spectacular by Klaus Grünberg magically manages to furnish the empty, bare stage space, which, apart from a sea of performers and glimpses of modernist set pieces, appears gleaming white, as if you were inside a brand-new Apple device.
The opening takes place in smoke and steam, where it only slowly becomes clear that Akhnaten’s deceased father is travelling across a burning sea on his way to the realm of the dead in what are at first diffuse lights in the fog, but turns out to be a hearse surrounded by half a hundred dancers and choir singers, who together with the music create a visual/musical experience that you do not encounter every day.
Photo: Monika Rittershaus
Barrie Kosky works with contrasts in his mesmerizing staging. The contrast between night and day, light and shadow, where light represents life, and darkness heralds the end and death of everything. It sounds quite ordinary, but I promise you that the result is the exact opposite.
Photo: Monika Rittershaus
The story is part of a kind of celebrity trilogy by American composer Philip Glass, which started with Einstein on the Beach and continued with Satyagraha, which is about Ghandi. The Akhnaten is about an Egyptian pharaoh who, long before the birth of Christ, established a monotheistic faith (the idea that there is only one almighty god) that, despite good intentions, never caught on.
Photo: Monika Rittershaus
The finale, in which the well-meaning prophet is beaten to a pulp by the masses, is absolutely fabulous and gripping, as a kind of topical reference to the mob rule that can be observed on social media.
The work consists of 11 scenes without a clearly legible, linear plot, but emerges as a kind of cut-up of moods and detached plateaus with an intense, solemn, semi-religious impact
A completely different and elementally exciting offer for opera and theatre goers with a taste for the unexpected. Six stars and a huge recommendation from GOT TO SEE THIS.
