Here comes ol' Boris Blacher. Good ol' Boris Blacher...yes, sir! Good ol' Boris Blacher...How I hate him.
No I don't. But even though two of his operas are on DVD, which puts him ahead of a lot of people, I couldn't help feeling surprised that he's well enough known for this to appear on Operavision. But it did! Clearly.
So what this is is a weird exercise in alienation that I certainly wasn't expecting based on 200 000 Taler and Preußisches Märchen. We all know what Romeo and Juliet is, of course, but this is the least Romeo and Juliet-y version you can imagine. All of the dialogue is Shakespearean (if the subtitles are to be believed), but somehow that just makes it seem more alien. The characters are just sort of staggering around in this contextless void, with various Montagues and Capulets appearing to holler things and then disappearing; the title characters do sing at each other a few times, but there's no sense of them actually, like, being really in love. It's all very detached, like the characters are aware they're in a story. To be clear, I don't think this is the production's fault; I think it was always meant to be a Brechtian theater-of-alienation kind of thing.
Well, it's certainly a different take! There is no chance that you will think it's just mimicking Gounod or Bellini. It definitely works in terms of what it's trying to do, but what it's trying to do is, by design, pretty distancing. The music is...sort of romantic, not atonal, but more minimalist than you'd find in Puccini. It fits the action well, which means, again, impressive in its way, but perhaps hard to exactly fall in love with. Still, at just seventy minutes, it's an unusual experience you can have in not that much time, so I say go for it.
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