Hans Werner Henze The Bassarids opera to libretto by W. H. Auden and Chester Kallman. Directed 2018 by Krzysztof Warlikowski at the Salzburg Festival. Stars singers Sean Panikkar (Dionysus), Russell Braun (Pentheus), Willard White (Cadmus), Nikolai Schukoff (Tiresias/ Calliope), Tanja Ariane Baumgartner (Agave/Venus), Károly Szemerédy (Captain/Adonis), Vera-Lotte Böcker (Autonoe/Proserpine), Anna Maria Dur (Beroe). Bassarid dancers are Rosalba Guerrero Torres, Hector Buenfil Palacio, Flavie Haour, Katharina Platz, and Javier Salcedo Hernandez. Kent Nagano conducts the Wiener Philharmoniker and the Konzertvereinigung Wiener Staatsopernchor. Designs by Małgorzata Sczczęśniak; lighting by Felice Ross; video by Denis Guéguin; choreography by Claude Bardouil; dramaturgy by Christian Longchamp. Directed for TV by Tizianoa Mancini. Sung in English. Released 2019, disc has 5.1 dts-HD Master Audio sound. Grade: NA
The Bassarids is based on the Bacchae or Bacchants from the play by Euripides. This production is Henze’s original 1-act English language score from 1966 with a prologue plus an intermission with dancers. The musical style is a mixture of traditional and atonal elements called by some “Strauss gone sour.”
Joe Cadagin warns us in the April 2020 Opera News at pages 52-53 to expect an aggressive production with “the stage strewn with the naked bodies of slender maenads and curly-haired youths who flail in ecstasy or crawl on all fours in puppy play. It’s more sickening than sexy, especially when things turn bloody and cadavers in various states of limblessness start to appear.” Cadagin so says that Tiziano Mancini has trouble making his video while “contending with the Boschian sprawl of activity spread over four sets, which designer Małgorzata Sczczęśniak arranges railcar-style across the vast Felsenreitschule.”
This HDVD will not please all, but will instantly be the definitive recording of The Bassarids (ArkivMusic lists one 1991 mono-sound CD version of the opera as it was broadcast on radio in German translation).
Here area trailers from Arthaus Musik and the Salzburg Festival. You have been warned:
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