{"id":690,"date":"2009-03-07T15:34:00","date_gmt":"2009-03-07T15:34:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp\/2009\/03\/hes_a_hollander_and_hes_ok.html"},"modified":"2009-03-07T15:34:00","modified_gmt":"2009-03-07T15:34:00","slug":"hes_a_hollander_and_hes_ok","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/2009\/03\/hes_a_hollander_and_hes_ok.html","title":{"rendered":"He&#8217;s a Hollander, and He&#8217;s OK"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span lang=\"EN-GB\"><\/p>\n<p>At the Royal Opera House (with one more performance, tonight [March 7] and a BBC Radio 3 broadcast on May 30) is&nbsp;one of the musically finest productions of Wagner&#8217;s &nbsp;<em>Die Fliegenede Hollander&nbsp;<\/em>I can remember. Bryn Terfel looks more like a Monty Python lumberjack than a sailor, let alone&nbsp;the Wandering Jew, but his singing of the&nbsp;role&nbsp;of the Flying Dutchman is so nuanced and dramatic that it&#8217;s an astonishing bonus that the same is true of Anja Kempe&#8217;s Senta. There have been a certain number of critical complaints that the costumes, the wavy curtains during the overture, and the large curving set all ignore Wagner&#8217;s (over)explicit stage directions. However, I feel that&nbsp;Tim Albery&#8217;s contemporary dress production with splendid, simple sets by Michael Levine,is simply straightforward, with the confidence, unusual as it is welcome, to let the story tell itself.&nbsp;And its single departure from simplicity, when the spinning song takes place in a factory full of sewing machines, is such a good visual joke that it made me love the production even more. Mind you, it was so different from last month&#8217;s concert performance at the Barbican that it really could almost be another work entirely &#8211; but isn&#8217;t that a good thing? Doesn&#8217;t it mean that the staging actually adds something significant?<\/p>\n<p>T: +44 871 911 0200<\/p>\n<p><font size=\"2\"><\/p>\n<p><\/font><\/span><a href=\"http:\/\/www.eno.org\/\"><font size=\"2\"><span lang=\"EN-GB\">www.eno.org<\/font><\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>At the Royal Opera House (with one more performance, tonight [March 7] and a BBC Radio 3 broadcast on May 30) is&nbsp;one of the musically finest productions of Wagner&#8217;s &nbsp;Die Fliegenede Hollander&nbsp;I can remember. Bryn Terfel looks more like a Monty Python lumberjack than a sailor, let alone&nbsp;the Wandering Jew, but his singing of the&nbsp;role&nbsp;of [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-690","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-uncategorized","7":"entry"},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pbv6zV-b8","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/690","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=690"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/690\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=690"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=690"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=690"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}