IDOMENEO • BRUXELLES
★★★★☆☆
Photo: Simon Van Rompay
REVIEW IDOMENEO: CAPTIVATING MOZART AND NEUROLOGY IN BRUSSELS
At first, it almost seems as if there is more vitality in Mozart’s 300-year-old Idomeneo than in Calixto Bieto’s three-week-old production at La Monnaie in Brussels, where the Spanish enfant terrible director gives Mozart’s early breakthrough work a treat that challenges most.
Photo: Simon Van Rompay
The restless provocateur Bieito has toned down the absurdities slightly in this production, but nevertheless plunges Mozart’s opera seria universe into a PTSD-like chaos unfolding in the mind of the Greek commander Idomeneo.
Photo: Simon Van Rompay
On his way home from the campaign in Troy, Idomeneo finds himself in distress at sea with his crew. Only through a deal with the sea god Neptune does he make it ashore alive—on the condition that he sacrifice the first person he encounters.
Of course, it turns out to be his own son, Idamante, and the otherwise decisive commander is thus placed in a serious predicament.
The set design consists of seven or eight semi-transparent, five-meter-tall frosted monoliths in angular constellations that glide around the stage, forming labyrinthine corridors, claustrophobic corners, precarious refuges, and mental prisons in which the action unfolds amid psychedelic lighting and hallucinatory video projections.
Photo: Simon Van Rompay
A simple aesthetic that, on the one hand, seems almost too bare, but on the other hand works surprisingly well as a visual representation of the complex neurology that serves as the production’s unifying concept. Modern costumes break with any mythological references and place the action in a clinical timelessness.
Vocally, La Monnaie delivers, as usual, a first-class experience. In the title role, Joshua Stewart impresses with vocal power and stage presence as a king who is both noble and broken—and gradually sliding into madness.
Elettra (Kathryn Lewek) is in love with the doomed Idamante and transformed into a sort of fetishist in one of the opera’s more scandalous scenes, where she masturbates with Idamante’s shoe to her own loud delight and the audience’s astonishment. Her final aria, performed with blazing energy, truly ignites the audience’s enthusiasm.
In the orchestra pit, Enrico Onofri brings Mozart’s score to life in the most beautiful way—not least in the production’s magnificent choral sequences.
Photo: Simon Van Rompay
All in all, it is a captivating, though at times also debatable, staging that navigates the psychological depths of the work with all the dramatic pros and cons that entails.
Idomeneo from 1781 may not be the most refreshing work in and of itself—and I actually think it’s appropriate to give it a shot of vitamins and take an artistic risk that challenges traditions and consolidates the house at the top of Europe’s opera hierarchy.
Four stars from GOT TO SEE THIS to La Monnaie in Brussels, which once again proves to be worth the trip.
