+ his acting talent and dancing too. A joy to listen and watch.🙂

Christoph Marthaler was one of the leading stage directors of his time, admired for his creativity and for thinking outside boring conservative ideas. His new Falstaff premiered at Salzburg Festival just a few days ago. Maybe, just maybe, he knows a bit more about directing than some random person on the internet.

This is one of the best performances ever. Just watch and listen Schäfer's acting.

I'm by no means against new ideas and creative reimaginations of old repertoire but I find this performance pretty underwhelming. There are some funny ideas, sure, but they overstay their welcome in my opinion. Whether it's the recitatives with the electronic keyboard which is amusing at first but soon starts to become annoying or the stuff with the electric recliner (or however it's called). It's a funny prop at first but it makes the whole scene with Susanna, the Count and Basilio extremely static and lacking in dynamic blocking. The scene where the Count discovers Cherubino usually gets a big laugh out of the audience but because they ignored the libretto in this instance and had Cherubino hide elsewhere it falls flat. I think blocking is one of the most important parts of staging an opera and it's just lacking here. Good blocking can make a traditional performance exciting and it can turn a radical new approach into a snoozefest. Just compare this performance with the 2006 performance with Diana Damrau and Ildebrando D'Arcangelo here on KZbin. It's a traditional version but because of the dynamic blocking and the brilliant performances I find it way more exciting than this version. It's a joy to watch.

100%! Some of these choices are so weird. I wonder why the singers go along with it! Maybe they get bored?

There's only one Maestro there and that's Mattei!!!