Stravinsky - Oedipus Rex

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Stravinsky - Oedipus Rex

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Stravinsky - Oedipus Rex
DVD ISO | NTSC | Region 1 | 1992 | Picture Format: NTSC 4:3 | Audio Format: PCM Stereo | Duration: ~57 min | 3.12 GB
Subtitles: Multi-Language

After the Lion King, is there any more famous or lauded director today than Julie Taymor, a status confirmed again by her magical production of Magic Flute for the Met this season? Add in Euripides, Stravinsky, Jessye Norman, Seiji Ozawa and a young(er) Bryn Terfel - if this isn't this an all-star lineup made in heaven, what is?

What a sad commentary on the current state of marketing opera and classical music that it's taken over a decade to bring this incredible production to DVD (up to now it's been available only on VHS)

And incredible this production is. The marriage of Euripides, with his implicit violence depicted only in the voice of the chorus, and the neo-classical Stravinsky - far from the death-dance of Le Sacre - would appear a perfect marriage of dramatic reserve, yet, as I once heard Pierre Boulez say in an open rehearsal (and this is a gross paraphrase - I was so stunned to hear such a thing from another so famous an ascetic that I was momentarily disoriented) "Stravinsky was well known for saying music - his music particularly - is capable only of expressing itself, and not any sort of underlying emotional content. We all know better, of course."

As always, Taymor takes big chances. Oedipus is a man overlayed with symbol, a puppet head his crown and huge puppet hands at his sides, enough to send you into fits of giggles if the drama weren't so focused and riveting.

The male chorus is like a tribe of mudmen, attired in the rags of starvation, caked in the dust of drought. The imagery of a soaring vulture superimposed on the stage at the beggining of the opera, the way extras wrap Jocasta in the woven bounds of her hanging, the way the dissolution of Oedipus is evoked by the singer being doubled in a second Oedipus figure whose cast-like armour is dismembered to disgorge the disgraced king, to final scene of the chorus of mudmen, standing beneath the downpour that has broken the plague, as stoic and motionless as the field of terra cotta warriors unearthed in China, until their heads turn, ever-so-slightly, their eyes full of pity as they watch the naked, blinded Oedipus slowly walk between them on his road to exile and oblivion - one unforgettable image follows another.

Under Ozawa's direction, the cast, chorus and Saito Kinen orchestra are firing on all cylinders. In the way she channels the underlying power of both Euripides' text and Stravinky's music, Taymor raises the opera to the level of ritual - not empty ritual as ritual most often becomes, but the raw ritual just hatched from primal experience.

This DVD is a "must-have"