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Garsington Opera, Wormsley Estate, StokenchurchBruno Ravella’s production has a glamorous staging that allows Miah Persson’s understated refinement to register
“Time is a strange thing,” the Marschallin tells us in Der Rosenkavalier. Richard Strauss’s bittersweet comedy of manners examines the way time irrevocably changes lives, and the score charts its passing by gliding anachronistically between periods, evoking 18th-century Vienna (where the opera is set), the 19th-century city of the Viennese waltz, and the dissonant, modernist world of the period (1909-10) in which it was written.
Bruno Ravella’s new Garsington Opera production adds another period into the mix by relocating it to the 1950s, where Miah Persson’s glamorous Marschallin dons a Dior-ish new look suit in Act one, then arrives in a stunning couture ball gown in Act three to resolve the escalating emotional tangle between Hanna Hipp’s gauche Octavian, Madison Leonard’s wilful, spirited Sophie and Derrick Ballard’s Ochs. Continue reading...