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Multimedia Director for Alexander von Zemlinsky, Der Zwerg
2021
Multimedia Director for Alexander von Zemlinsky, Der Zwerg
Bucharest
"It is coming up to the centenary of Der Zwerg, Alexander Zemlinsky’s one-acter about an obnoxious Infanta who spends her birthday toying with the affections (and ultimately the life) of an unlovely dwarf. The fallacy of the ‘autonomous’ musical work notwithstanding, one advantage of doing this opera in concert was a de-emphasizing of its semi-biographical aspects, which directors of recent productions have been inescapably drawn to. As thought-provoking as it may be for a director like Tobias Kratzer to dig deep into the Zemlinsky/Dwarf and Alma Schindler/Infanta parallels (as he did two years ago in Berlin), they needn’t necessarily be present and Carmen Lidia Vidu’s whimsical video projections quite consciously avoided them. Her flood of relentlessly ‘cute’ images – nearly all in lollipop pink and showing things like the infanta from Velázquez’s Las Meninas at a pool party – was knocking on the door of Japanese kawaii culture, which may sound at odds with the dramatic content and music of Der Zwerg but turned out a perverse stroke of genius. The more the wacky bubblegum visuals insisted that this was just another regular fairytale, the more the mind revolted in the face of the story’s astonishing cruelty." (Seb Smallshaw, Seen and Heard International)
