Saturday, April 25, 2009

Queen of the Night


Diana Damrau has invented a new Queen of the Night, urgently dramatic – in an urgently punitive way. The image above makes me suspect a conscious evocation of the stylized, cross-eyed frenzy portrayed in Utamaro prints of Kabuki actors. A clip of the famous pyrotechnic aria is available here and well worth a watch. The DVD is available here.