Marie-Ange Todorovitch / Reviews

The singers maintain a sense of structure in their wildly veering vocal lines and intense onstage action. Angela Denoke’s Montezuma has a dramatic, direct soprano that communicates her character and emotions expressively. Opposite her stands Bo Skovhus as Cortez, who adds the challenge of surrealistic physical spasms to the already-considerable challenge of his vocal part. He approaches it with frankness that matches Denoke’s, singing solidly and straightforwardly. Both voices carry through the large space while maintaining a natural, spoken quality. Montezuma is supported beautifully by a rich-voiced contralto (Marie-Ange Todorovitch) and a bell-toned, inhumanly high soprano (Susanna Andersson), who sometimes sing from the pit and sometimes climb onto the stage to commiserate with her and do shots together. The two “speakers” (Stephan Rehm and Peter Pruchniewitz), who support Cortez, also manage their tricky rhythms and guttural grunts with accuracy and feeling. Rihm’s music and Konwitschny’s vision have combined to create something extraordinary that is simultaneously abstract and concrete, challenging and accessible, surprising and familiar, modern and ancient, exciting and bewildering. If this is a possible future of opera, it’s one worth pursuing.