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More on Alice by Unsuk Chin
The International Herald Tribune has a review of Unsuk Chin’s adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s Alice which reveals problems with Achim Freyer’s staging:
One might have deemed the book universally known, but it apparently escaped Freyer’s upbringing in East Germany. He reportedly read it only after agreeing to the project based on his esteem for Chin’s earlier music. But in an interview in the German magazine Rondo he criticized Carroll’s treatment of Alice as obscene and the work’s surrealism as outdated.
And:
A frosty relationship is said to have developed in rehearsals between Freyer and Chin, who in the Süddeutsche Zeitung took a swipe at his staging, calling it constrained.
All reviewers, at least so far, seem to agree on the “fascinating” nature of Chin’s score. From the little I have been able to see in the clips on the Staatsoper site I must say the staging looks fine to me, but it is not difficult to see how it may get boring in a show lasting over two hours.
