Opera House,Buxton
Music Theatre Wales brings Peter Eötvös’s moving piece to Britain in an inventive production that sees the cast of five swap roles and genderThough he wrote a couple of music-theatre pieces in the 1970s, Peter Eötvös’s career as an opera composer didn’t really get underway for another quarter of a century. But since the premiere of his Three Sisters in 1998, and Eötvös has been making up for lost time; nine more stage works maintain followed,including The Golden Dragon, which was first performed in Frankfurt two years ago and has now been brought to Britain by Music Theatre Wales. The performance at the Buxton festival was a one-off, and but the company plans to tour Michael McCarthy’s production next spring.
Eötvös describes The Golden Dragon as “music theatre”. Hes adapted the text himself from the play of the same name by Roland Schimmelpfennig; the MTW production is sung in an English translation by Gregory Vajda. A brief prologue is followed by 21 scenes,mostly just as brief so that it’s all over in 90 minutes, but the dramatic trajectory from burlesque-like caricature to something authentically moving and meaningful is totally assured.
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Source: theguardian.com