I got the news this morning: Die tote Stadt has been awarded DVD Recording of the Year by Gramophone. I congratulate the singers, the conductor Kirill Petrenko, and the producers for putting on an admittedly obscure opera--no mention of it in the three opera guides I have.
Jonas Kaufmann and Marlis Petersen, that must be dream casting for a twentieth century opera, and they sing so well (Petersen is a great Lulu). The staging is somewhat nondescript; no attempt is made to recreate the dreary religiosity of Bruges, the 'dead city'. We're in the house of a solid citizen whose wife has been dead for a few years, yet he can't let go of her memory. The bright lighing inside belies the morose tone of the music. For a better visual representation of the story, go to the James King-Karan Armstrong version of 1983, very atmospheric.
