Favorite Opera Recording.

[Alex K]

Lotte Lehmann's version of Der Ring

Aha, old school
Do you have a linky? Is that one with Melchior?

[Rev. Rye]

I don't know it really, shall check it out! While I liked the chereau production itself, I'm not a big fan of the whole abstract "director's theater" that got started in that time.

To be fair, the beginning of Regietheater was 25 years before the Chereau Ring, when Wieland Wagner took over the Bayreuth Festival. Honestly, if not for Wieland deciding to radically rework the stagings of his grandpa's operas, there's a very real chance Wagner wouldn't have lived down the association with the Nazis.

That said, there's quite a bit of bad regietheater:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oF7ocNl6nXo

Even ignoring that the fact that the music is done so fast that it might as well be orchestrated by a pop punk band, there's so many problems with this:

• Why is the set, which is, if memory serves, meant to be The Commendatore condemning Don Giovanni to Hell, done in so much white that it looks like a representation of Heaven?
  
• Why does the statue of The Commendatore look absolutely nothing like a statue?
  
• Why are the bikini babes there? They could be a substitute for the demons who carry him into Hell, but they don't really do anything. They just stand there and walk around the set a bit. Also, apparently, if photos are to be believed, there is apparently a scene where they're zombies, which makes no sense.
  
• On that note, what's that string some of them are wearing around their midriff, and why are only a few of them wearing it?
  
• Why do they stage it to look like Leporello's being framed for stabbing Don Giovanni?
  
• Why does Leporello dress like Raj from The Big Bang Theory?
  

Of course, I think it can be pretty interesting; Mostly going on non-operatic versions, I once saw a version of How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying that had women playing the male roles and men playing the women's roles and projections taking the place of the set (also, the actress playing J. Pierpont Finch had several fingers missing on one hand), and Chicago Shakespeare's takes on Shakespeare plays are often excellent. Honestly, there are times where I find myself wondering about the possibilities of setting Taming of the Shrew in a mental hospital during the early Sixties (probably with the taming including the threat of an implied lobotomy).