Hope in the Darkness: Simon Williams discovers plenty of contemporary resonance in San Francisco’s revival of David Alden’s ‘Lohengrin’

When it was first presented in London and Antwerp in 2018, David Alden’s production of Lohengrin struck many as being unduly dark, but when it arrived at the San Francisco Opera on 15 October 2023, it unmistakably offered a disturbingly appropriate comment on the dire situation in which the world currently finds itself. Paul Steinberg’s forbidding sets eerily evoke images of a devastated Kiev, Gaza City and other current sites of war. With a performance in the USA, a country that is suffering a perilous crisis of confidence due to a lack of trust in public life – a theme central to the action of Lohengrin – a work that has occasionally been slighted as the composer’s most dated composition suddenly takes on new and alarmingly immediate relevance.