Fifty shades of grey
Grey men in grey overcoats walking through grey architecture. If you had to pick an image to reflect the current mood, the prevailing fashion in opera productions, this would be it. We may have outgrown the overtly Nazi settings of a few years back, but stepping into their highly polished boots are a whole platoon of non specifically fascist, 20th century exilic fantasies — all brutality, brutalism and barbed wire. Glyndebourne’s Poliuto, the Royal Opera’s Guillaume Tell, Idomeneo and Nabucco, even English National Opera’s Force of Destiny, the list goes on, and now boasts a new member in David Bösch’s Il trovatore. At least Bösch isn’t going gentle into that
