Though not all Valery Gergiev’s recent departures from his native repertoire have been successes, here is a work that is the elaborate German equivalent of the magic of Rimsky-Korsakov, a composer close to every Russian conductor’s heart. To stress the international cross-currents of the event, Hugo Von Hofmannsthal’s text will be sung in the original German – presumably by Russians, although the EIF programme supplies no names – and the staging is in the hands of Jonathan Kent (pictured), the English enfant terrible of the recent Glyndebourne production of Don Giovanni.
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EIF to recognise at last the musical tapestry of the shadowless woman
With three performances of Die Frau Ohne Schatten, Richard Strauss's sprawling symbolic fairy tale about a woman without a shadow, being given on three consecutive nights by the Mariinsky Opera, the Edinburgh International Festival (EIF) will bestow its belated blessing on a music drama that history declares to be as much a monster as a masterpiece.
