Double Measure: Matthew Rye finds two new productions from the same director reap differing rewards

Reviews of Der fliegende Holländer, directed Gürbaca, conducted Pointner, Antwerp, 2016; Lohengrin, directed Gürbaca, conducted Netopil, Essen, 2016.

March 2017, Volume 11, Number 3, 72–4.

It’s not often that a director gets to mount two new Wagnerian productions in different theatres in the space of two months, but Der fliegende Holländer and Lohengrin offer contrasting challenges that German director Tatjana Gürbaca, one-time student of both Ruth Berghaus and Peter Konwitschny, tackled in Antwerp and Essen respectively. (The earlier work was performed in the location of the later, as it happens, while Lohengrin’s mythical Swan Castle home in Kleve lies not that far downstream from the Ruhr’s capital.) I had only experienced her work once before this Wagnerian double-act – a rather muddled staging of Schreker’s Der ferne Klang in Mannheim in 2015, that suggested a preoccupation with politicisation and a propensity for over-direction and visual obfuscation.