Eötvös - Lady Sarashina
Opéra Comique, Paris, Tuesday 17 February 2009 Conductor: Alejo Perez. Production and choreography: Ushio Amagatsu. Sets: Natsuyuki Nakanishi. Costumes: Masatomo Ota. Lady Sarashina: Mary Plazas. Trio of singers: Peter Bording, Ilse Eerens, Salomé Kammer. Orchestre de l’Opéra national de Lyon. A cliché it most certainly is, but it is awful how time flies. My blog starts in March 2003, but Eötvös’s Tri Sestry isn’t on it, which means it’s already over 6 years since I saw it. It was because I still had such good, clear memories of it that I was happy this season (as part of my policy always to take at least some of the contemporary stuff on offer, except the dreaded Saariaho) to book tickets to Lady Sarashina at the Opéra Comique. Eötvös’s fourth opera, like Tri Sestry commissioned by Lyon and directed by Ushio Amagatsu, is in nine tableaux, based on as many fragments of an 11th-century Japanese biography-cum-travelogue called As I Crossed The Bridge Of Dreams or, more or less, Mrs ...