This impressive and startling production of German composer Bernd Alois Zimmermann’s iconic opera Die Soldaten, staged in the Park Avenue Armory as part of the Lincoln Center Festival, achieves the intimate and immersive “total theater” experience the composer took “decisive steps” to realize more than four decades ago. The audience, literally traveling along the length of a narrow stage extending 220 feet, is transported into Zimmermann’s monumental and exhaustive transformation of Jakob Lenz’s 1776 play and the composer’s dark - and timely - comment on World War II.The 110-piece Bochumer Symphoniker and its enormous percussion section - along with a jazz combo and forty singers, actors and dancers - quotes Bach amid Zimmermann’s twelve-tone composition and shares a multimedia palette with taped and amplified music to produce a maelstrom of wrenching emotion, and as the composer so boldly envisioned, one of the most important operatic works of the second half of the 20th-century.
See all dates for Die Soldaten at the Park Avenue Armory on Lincoln Center’s Web site.
2 comments I saw the première in Bochum, Germany. It was an absolute breathtaking experience.
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kate montgomery Says:
A great story of a truly remarkable undertaking!