“Is that blood? It’s too thin. I need a Tarantino splurge!”
Nothing gets the opera world’s heart pumping like a new production of Wagner’s Ring Cycle. The Royal Opera House announced its new staging in the depths of the pandemic, a tantalising shimmer of Rheingold when it felt as though we were all in locked-down Nibelheim.
There was even greater sparkle when Barrie Kosky was attached to the project. The director, who during a decade in charge of Berlin’s “third” opera house, the Komische Oper, turned the theatre into a byword for crowd-pleasing yet thought-provoking entertainment, is a garrulous, outspoken Australian. Once seen, his shows are usually not forgotten.
Right now, in the rehearsal room at Covent Garden, he’s sweating over a key
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