Rusalka, Royal Opera House

Rusalka, Royal Opera House - Aside from two wonderful concert performances in 2003, conducted by Charles Mackerras with Renee Fleming in the title-role, Dvorak’s Rusalka – first seen in Prague in the year of Queen Victoria’s death – has waited over a century to reach Covent Garden.

Slick concept: Rusalka at the Royal Opera House

But if Jossi Wieler and Sergio Morabito’s production was the best that anyone could find, I think we could have waited a bit longer. Imported from the Salzburg Festival, it is a prime example of the pompous intellectualism which now dominates Eurozone theatre, and I only hope that the furious booing with which it was greeted at the curtain call means that it will be returned to sender at the earliest opportunity.

A hot-air filled programme note written by Morabito sets the tone. “The failure of mere corporeality denounces the rhetoric of a society that has severed its relationship with its Other.” Dvorak may have thought he was composing a romantic fable of a water-nymph who surrenders her voice in order to become human – a melancholy parable of the injunction to be careful what you wish for – but W&M know better.

Rather than allowing for ambiguity or poetic suggestiveness, they present an “alienating” interpretation which seeks to shock, baffle and challenge the audience without any sensitivity to the emotional mood of the score or the surface of the text. Of the glory of lake, forest and field painted by the music, of the tragedy of a love which tries and fails, there is no hint.

W&M simply use the opera as a pretext to re-cast Rusalka as a pathetic small-town brothel whore who craves suburban respectability. Girls run around in their scanties, blood is shed and it’s all quite nasty. This slick concept wears very thin very fast, and apart from the witty transformation of a huge pantomime black cat into a slinky real one, I found nothing either amusing or edifying along the way.

I would far rather expatiate on the orchestra’s impassioned playing, inspired by the gloriously lithe and sensual conducting of Yannick Nézet-Seguin. I also wish I had more space to praise Camilla Nylund’s bravely committed performance in the title-role, and the strong vocal support offered by Bryan Hymel (the Prince), Alan Held (Vodnik), Agnes Zwierko (Jezibaba) and Madeleine Pierard, Justina Gringyte and Anna Devin (wood nymphs). They all do honour to Rusalka: Wieler and Morabito just vandalise it. ( telegraph.co.uk )

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Royal Opera's Rusalka greeted with chorus of boos

Royal Opera's Rusalka greeted with chorus of boos - A Royal Opera production which casts The Little Mermaid as a prostitute in a brothel was met by a chorus of boos on its opening night.

A number of patrons walked out of Rusalka, the Dvorak opera based on the traditional fairytale, in protest at the “vulgar” staging.

The costumes, in the words of the Daily Telegraph’s critic, consisted of “girls running around in their scanties”.

Rusalka, starring Camilla Nyland, left, is set in a brothel with the water nymphs as prostitutes

Hans Christian Andersen’s 19th century fairytale tells the story of a mermaid who longs to leave her underwater kingdom. She falls in love with a handsome prince but must give up her voice to do so, and her foray into the human world ends in tragedy.

The contemporary adaptation at the Royal Opera House is set in a "seedy backstreet world", with a brothel madam in place of the wicked witch. The tragic heroine and her fellow water nymphs ply their trade as prostitutes.

Kasper Holten, director of opera at Covent Garden, said: “Rusalka is a fairytale but, as we know, all good fairytales are also about not just the pretty pictures but about the demons, about the nightmares in life.

“As with all great operas, this is essentially a tragedy and I hope there will be good reason to share a tear or two towards the ending of Rusalka.”

Not every audience member lasted that long.

“I was so disappointed, I had to leave at the interval,” said Jane Tinkler, a researcher at the London School of Economics.

“As long as I kept my eyes shut, it was gorgeous. But the set and costume design owed too much of a debt to The Only Way Is Essex."

Other audience members remained until the end but registered their displeasure with a barrage of boos.

Christine Hodgson, another opera-goer, said: "It's not the first time I've seen a modern production, but this is the first time I have ever heard the designers being booed by the whole House.

"The prince took off his wedding outfit and changed into an unappealing T-shirt. It was almost as if they went to a charity shop and found whatever they could."

Rupert Christiansen, the Telegraph critic, said directors Jossi Wieler and Sergio Morabito “simply use the opera as a pretext to re-cast Rusalka as a pathetic small-town brothel whore who craves suburban respectability”.

He described the reworking as an act of “vandalism” and concluded: “I only hope that the furious booing with which it was greeted at the curtain call means that it will be returned to sender at the earliest opportunity.”

Critics did praise the performances and the conducting of Yannick Nézet-Seguin. Opera Britannia said: “Close your eyes and live the concert experience and you’ll enjoy a musically superb evening. Eyes wide open, it’s a shocker.”

The production was first seen at the Salzburg Festival in 2008 and this is the first time it has been staged at the Royal Opera. It runs until March 14.

A Royal Opera spokesman said that no patrons had asked for their money back but “it’s safe to say Rusalka is causing debate and a great deal of interest”.

Last year, the Royal Opera flirted with controversy by staging an opera based on the life and times of Anna Nicole Smith, the Playboy model who married an oil billionaire 63 years her senior and died of a drugs overdose. ( telegraph.co.uk )

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Parsons Dance is eclectic yet accessible in Harriman performance

Parsons Dance is eclectic yet accessible in Harriman performance - Visually arresting by way of incredible physicality, dynamic lighting and eclectic movement vocabulary, Parsons Dance is a proudly accessible modern dance company. Its debut performance Saturday night in the Muriel Kauffman Theatre of the Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts marked the company’s 11th appearance as part of the Harriman-Jewell Series.

Kansas City native David Parsons, co-founder and artistic director of the company, selected a representative overview from the company’s wide repertoire for the evening’s program. All choreography was by Parsons. The lighting design, an integral part of the performance, was by Howell Binkley.

Parsons dancers, shown here in a publicty photo, performed Saturday at the Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts

Read more here: http://www.kansascity.com/2012/01/28/3397914/parsons-dance-is-eclectic-yet.html#storylink=cpy

The program opened with “The Envelope” (1984). It’s a fun, goofy piece that follows the journey of an envelope as it is alternatively discarded and sought, rejected and fought over. The bombastic bravado of Rossini’s operatic scores contributed to the humor. The dancers, wearing black hooded bodysuits and sunglasses, examined the envelope with birdlike curiosity, their chests sunken, framed by elbows akimbo. A male soloist with strong-shouldered carriage executed broad, gangly turns, at odds with the other dancers’ twitchy gestures.

This was followed by two pieces set to music by Kenji Bunch. “Slow Dance” (2003) was elegant, limpid. Three couples, staged in a dusky block of light, sinuously wrapped around each other. Delicate melodies from piano and violin rose and entwined in an arced structure; the dancers emulated with twisting corkscrew turns which ended with a raised arm. The piece was capped, though, by a coda of sharply accented phrases.

“Swing Shift” (2003) had a similar sonic pallet, but was contrasted by warm lighting, velvety red and peach costumes and driving, pulsating rhythms. The steps were reminiscent of traditional social dances of ballroom, Latin and swing. Fiery duets, an articulated solo by Sarah Braverman and inventive transitions created a stunning, abundant visual feast.

Parsons’ newest piece, “Portinari” (2011), was dedicated in memory of Richard Harriman, the founder of the series. Set to Samuel Barber’s “Adagio for Strings,” it was the most theatrical piece of the evening, a Pygmalion tale of a painter whose work comes to life, though the duet was stagey and had some uneven transitions.

“Caught” (1982) is a stalwart of the repertoire and an audience favorite. It featured repetitive electronic layering from guitarist Robert Fripp. Soloist Steven Vaughn appeared suspended in air through a series of jumps captured in strobe-light, his vigorous performance leaving the audience, too, gasping for breath.

A party atmosphere ended the evening with a tribute to Milton "Nascimento" (2003). The Brazilian musician’s breezy, wordless singing inspired a joyous work of athletic leaps and tosses, exuberant heel clicks and loose-bodied turns with wide-swung arms. ( kansascity.com )

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Is It Art, Science or a Test of People?

Is It Art, Science or a Test of People? - Over the past several years art museums have begun to place much more emphasis on a concept they call the “visitor experience.” Few, though, have attempted to define that concept quite as broadly — or as bodily — as the New Museum, which is mounting a career survey of the Belgian-born artist Carsten Höller that opens on Wednesday.

A (greatly abridged) menu of the experiences available to viewers — after they sign a legal waiver and abandon all hope of conventional museumgoing decorum — would read something like this:

Walk around while seeing the world upside down and backward. Hurtle two stories toward the earth in a metal and plastic tube as others watch and, almost certainly, laugh. Ingest an unidentified white pill, or a fistful if you choose. Inhale an amphetaminelike substance said to induce amorous feelings. Feel your nose grow. Feel the walls shift around you. Feel yourself slam face first into a tree at high speed. Or, if you really want to prove your dedication to art, take off all your clothes and lie with friends or strangers in a modified sensory deprivation tank in heavily salinized water, heated to the temperature of human skin.

Mr. Höller, 49, began his professional life as a scientist, and it is perhaps because of this that a bit of a Dr. Moreau reputation has always clung to him, though it is not wholly undeserved. He did, after all, once design wickedly funny Swiftian traps for children. (The simplest involved a seemingly live electric cord lying on the floor surrounded by pieces of candy.)

Visitors to the Carsten Höller show at the New Museum will be able to hurtle two stories down a corkscrewing metal slide. They will also be able to feel their noses grow, among other pursuits.

But as he walked around the New Museum on the Lower East Side one recent morning, trying politely to stay out of the way of the construction workers installing his pieces, diabolical was not a description that leapt to mind. Slim and balding, he could still easily pass for the agricultural entomologist he once was. Except that now his deeply inquisitive, German-accented musings refer not to cereal aphids but to the humans who consent to participate in his thoroughly subjective experiments, which stand science on its head, yielding results for the sake of the test subject rather than that of the tester.

The devices and environments Mr. Höller has conceived since he began to make art 18 years ago — he prefers to think of them not as art objects but as “confusion machines” — require a great deal more planning and money than conventional lab equipment. In front of him that morning on the museum’s fourth floor, a man with a metal saw was completing the topmost part of a piece that has become one of Mr. Höller’s signatures: a corkscrewing tubular metal slide for grown-ups. It was installed by cutting large holes through the concrete and steel of the museum’s third and fourth floors.

As intrepid visitors did when a more complex version was installed in the Turbine Hall of the Tate Modern in London in 2006 and 2007, visitors to the New Museum will grab a cloth pad, sit on it and plunge into the tube. A few moments later they will squirt out the other end on the second floor, their expressions and bodily contortions during the drop having been visible to everyone else in the museum through the slide’s windows.

“You will be able to see the madness in their faces for a split second, and then — zup — they will be gone,” Mr. Höller said with a smile. “It’s a very odd thing with a slide; it’s quite an efficient way to go from place to place, but it is also like a barely controlled fall. It’s a very specific kind of madness to go down one.”

Mr. Höller’s works also set out to induce a general kind of madness: a troubling, anti-Enlightenment awareness that despite the certainties won by science over the past three or four hundred years, human beings still know relatively little about the world around them and have no good reason even to trust their senses. While such a state may seem disturbing, Mr. Höller views it instead as “truly productive,” an existential means of throwing off the bonds of determinism and treating human experience, if only for a little while, as a kind of artwork to be shaped and played with.

“What I’m doing is certainly not science, but maybe it’s not art, either; it’s something in between, a third thing,” said Mr. Höller, who was raised by German parents in Brussels and has lived and worked for the past several years in Stockholm.

One of his pieces, called “The Pinocchio Effect,” tricks the mind into believing that the nose is growing: you hold your nose with your fingers and place a small vibrating device on one of your upper arms. Another piece, using a small video screen in front of each eye, mimics the effect of moving through a forest, except that at one point, the eyes go in different directions, around a tree.

“I’ve actually seen people fall backward out of their chair when this happens,” Mr. Höller said, adding, “I hope everyone will be O.K.”

A pair of wraparound prism goggles, which visitors can use while seeing the exhibition or even take home for a few days, turns the world upside down and flips left and right, an effect that is more terrifying that it sounds. (I tried on a pair, attempted to take a single step and had to grab a table to keep from falling. Mr. Höller assured me, “The first hour is really the worst, then it gets much better.”)

Even at a time when contemporary art is inviting much more participation on the part of the viewer, the Höller show will be interactive to a degree not seen outside a children’s science museum. And with the potential for nudity, shrieking and pratfalls, it will put the New Museum’s staff and security guards to a test unlike any they have experienced, said Massimiliano Gioni, the museum’s director of exhibitions, who organized the show with Gary Carrion-Murayari and Jenny Moore.

“There’s the old question of whether the scientist trains the mouse, or vice versa,” Mr. Gioni said. “In this case I think Carsten will be forcing the museum to train itself. But this is good. It’s the kind of thing we’re supposed to be doing here.”

For his part, Mr. Höller simply seems happy to have been given a new place to experiment and a whole new city full of willing subjects.

“For every person who comes in, it will be like exposing a film to the light and seeing what image develops,” he said. “I try to make the conditions for the development. But I, personally, have no idea what the image will be.” ( nytimes.com )

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A Hong Kong opera faces censorship from Beijing

A Hong Kong opera faces censorship from Beijing - For months, public structures in Hong Kong have been draped with dreary sepia-coloured banners, some as large as a small building, publicising a new opera about Sun Yat-sen, the father of the Chinese Republic, the architect of the revolution of 1911 that brought down the Manchu dynasty. But the Hong Kong premiere on October 13 of a modern opera about a historical figure had created scarcely a musical ripple in the city, whose attention was turned towards upcoming concerts by the Vienna Philharmonic and a sold-out recital by the pianist Murray Perahia.

Then, on September 30, the Beijing premiere of Dr Sun Yat-sen at Beijing’s National Centre for the Performing Arts was abruptly called off for “logistical reasons”, which pitchforked the issue on to the front pages of Hong Kong newspapers amid a plethora of conspiracy theories. The reasons mooted for the cancellation run from reported complaints by the National Council of Performing Arts in Beijing that the music was either not ready or “too modern” to be performed, to speculation that the love story of Sun and his third wife, Soong Ching-ling, who was 26 years his junior, was too racy for Beijing’s censors. Inevitably, there have also been plenty of hypotheses put forward in this technicoloured soap opera that the political content worried the cultural commissars in Beijing. Although Sun is feted in both Communist China and democratic Taiwan, his life is a minefield of sensitivities for Communist Chinese government censors – not least his support for pan-Asian co-operation with Japan, long seen as an enemy of China, his request in 1923 to the US and European governments to take over China’s provincial capitals to modernise them and his attempt towards the end of his life to curry favour with brutal Chinese warlords.

Dr Sun Yat-sen, commissioned by Opera Hong Kong and the Hong Kong government to mark the 100th anniversary of the Xinhai revolution, has music by the Asian-American composer Huang Ruo in two versions: one is scored for western orchestras supported by Chinese instruments, the other uses traditional Chinese instruments only. No one is more bewildered by the cancellation of the opening performance than Candace Chong, the opera’s Hong Kong Chinese librettist, who graduated from Hong Kong’s Academy of Performing Arts in 2001. Chong had been on the verge of buying tickets for her family and herself to fly from New York to the Beijing premiere of the opera when she heard that it had been cancelled.

Speaking from New York, where she is working on a production of Chinglish, the new play by M Butterfly creator David Henry Hwang, Chong was at a loss to explain what might have triggered the cancellation. “For an opera to be cancelled three weeks before is ridiculous,” she said.

Chong explains that her libretto tells the story of the turbulent friendship between the wealthy Shanghainese businessman Charlie Soong and Sun. Indeed, the opera begins with a fundraising party at Soong’s home, where he is ostensibly gathering funds for the building of a new church – but in reality intending to divert the money to support the revolution. It ends, Chong says, with Soong “confessing that he tried to stop the marriage between Sun and his daughter because he didn’t believe the revolution would succeed”.

Soong was right. Despite the reverence in which Sun is held today, few revolutions failed as spectacularly as the revolution of 1911. As Jonathan Fenby, the author of Penguin’s history of modern China, notes in a recent essay, it was the local Chinese military warlords and foreign colonial powers such as Britain, Germany and Japan that “benefited most from the fall of the Manchus. This was a shift of regime, not a social sea change”.

After the revolution Sun took the post of president of the republic, on January 1 1912, but lost power after a couple of months to a military warlord, Yuan Shikai. He fled to Japan and in the 1920s was in and out of power in Guangdong, China’s southernmost province, where he presided over a push for modernity that included the provision of new schools and libraries and a fierce campaign against opium. (This period is the subject of a glowing exhibition at the Dr Sun Yat-sen Museum in Hong Kong that opened on September 30.)

But, according to Fenby, in Guangdong Sun actually ran a regime characterised by racketeering. “I know he’s this great haloed figure but I have never fallen for the Sun myth,” says Fenby. Chong, too, says that although the history books she read as a child in Hong Kong also presented Sun as “a hero who feared nothing”, after researching Sun’s life she saw him differently. “His whole life was about facing failure and trying to stick to his principles,” she explains.

Some of the speculation about why the opera was cancelled has centred on the Chinese government’s ultra-sensitivity on the internet and in performances to words like “corrupt government” – and even “jasmine”, in the aftermath of the Jasmine Revolution that unfolded in the Middle East this year. Such a Kafkaesque reading of the libretto would find plenty to give pause. In the first scene alone Sun sings, “The Qing court is furious, They are turning our country into a prison! But this cage cannot silence oppositional voices ... now there are debates with people urging change.”

Nevertheless, recent films such as Beginning of the Great Revival, about the 1911 revolution and the May 4 movement, supported by the Chinese government and released to mark the 100th anniversary, have not been immune to multiple interpretations and their fair share of criticism. A barrage of negative reviews of Beginning of the Great Revival on the internet was subsequently deleted by the Chinese authorities.

Arthur Miller once said a good newspaper was “a nation talking to itself”. The divide between Beijing’s cultural tsars and a young population that posts its true feelings on the internet is so large that censorship in China is increasingly a case of a government deluding itself. The latest rumpus about an opera about a revolutionary leader that might have been cancelled because of the liberal use of the word “revolution” in its script is only the most absurd example. ( slate.com )

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'Phantom of the Opera' at 25 offers a special show

'Phantom of the Opera' at 25 offers a special show — Andrew Lloyd Webber's "The Phantom of the Opera" will celebrate its 25th anniversary this weekend with a lavish birthday party that will certainly involve someone swinging from a chandelier.

Producers will broadcast on Sunday a live performance of the show from London's 5,500-seat Royal Albert Hall to movie houses in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe, Canada, Japan and Australia. The live performance — one of three shows at the hall — will be followed by rebroadcasts to cinemas on Oct. 5, 6 and 11.

"To celebrate such an extraordinary event as 25 years, we wanted to do something special, above and beyond just another gala performance," producer Cameron Mackintosh said in an interview from London. "We both thought that the most theatrical space with a number of seats was the Royal Albert Hall."

Ramin Karimloo and Sierra Boggess, who co-starred in the "Phantom" sequel "Love Never Dies" in London, will reunite for the special production. More than 200 original and current cast members, musicians and special guests are expected to make appearances at the Royal Albert Hall.

FILE - In this March 3, 2010, file photo, the Phantom, played by Ramin Karimloo, right, performs a scene with Christine, played by Sierra Boggess, from the sequel to The Phantom of the Opera, "Love Never Dies" at the Adelphi Theatre in central London. Producers will broadcast on Sunday a live performance of the original show "The Phantom of the Opera" from London's 5,500-seat Royal Albert Hall to movie houses in America, the UK, Europe, Canada, Japan and Australia. The live performance _ one of three shows at the hall _ will be followed by rebroadcasts to cinemas on Oct. 5, 6 and 11. (AP Photo/Joel Ryan, file)

In the U.S., the broadcast will be available on 500 screens in 43 states, from Alaska to West Virginia. It will also be released on DVD, CD and Blu-ray starting in November.

The show's original director, Hal Prince, who has directed or produced more than 50 musicals, plays and operas, including "Damn Yankees," ''West Side Story," ''Fiddler on the Roof," ''Cabaret," ''A Little Night Music" and "Sweeney Todd," thinks "Phantom" touched a need.

"It's more escapist than certainly anything I've ever worked on," he says. "The audience has all these stressful problems and they buy a ticket and go into a theater and lose themselves in another world entirely — and a romantic one. I think that's probably cause for its longevity."

The musical first opened on London's West End at the 1,200-seat Her Majesty's Theatre on Oct. 9, 1986, with Michael Crawford and Sarah Brightman in the lead roles. It's still there, more than 10,000 performances later.

It crossed the Atlantic and opened on Broadway on Jan. 26, 1988, and has clocked more than 9,800 performances, becoming the Great White Way's longest-running show ever. There have been dozens of productions worldwide, including current ones in Budapest, Hungary, Las Vegas and Kyoto, Japan, and one is planned next year in South Africa.

It has played to over 130 million people in 27 countries and has grossed over $5.6 billion worldwide — more than any film in history, including "Avatar," ''Titanic," ''Gone With the Wind" and "Star Wars."

Even a 2004 film version — directed by Joel Schumacher and starring Gerard Butler, Emmy Rossum, Patrick Wilson and Miranda Richardson — didn't slow the appetite for the masked, scarred man.

Mackintosh says the unstoppable success of the show was not so apparent to him or Lloyd Webber a quarter-century ago. "Nobody in their right mind in the theater can ever expect for it. They pray for a successful opening night and a decent run. So the kind of staggering statistics that the show has garnered over the years is just extraordinary," he says. "Both of us are grinning like Cheshire cats."

Based on a novel by Gaston Leroux, "Phantom" tells the story of a deformed composer who haunts the Paris Opera House and falls madly in love with an innocent young soprano, Christine. Lloyd Webber's lavish songs include "Masquerade," ''Angel of Music," ''All I Ask of You," ''The Phantom of the Opera" and "The Music of the Night."

"Phantom" was one of four megahits — including "Cats," ''Les Miserables" and "Miss Saigon" — that Mackintosh produced over a span of just eight years in the 1980s and 1990s, something he credits with "incredibly good luck."

"It's never happened before and who knows if it will happen again. It's just amazing," he says. "It certainly won't happen again for me."

Prince, 83, won't be in London for the special performance — he's simply too busy. He directing a new musical, "Prince of Broadway," which celebrates his career and has co-direction and choreography from Susan Stroman, a book by David Thompson and music by Jason Robert Brown.

"I get a lot of energy working on something new," Prince says,

But he plans to be in New York when "Phantom" hits 25 years on Broadway — in just a year and a half. "Oh, sure. You bet," he says. ( Associated Press )

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Israeli desert opera festival becomes a "tradition"

Israeli desert opera festival becomes a "tradition" - An Israeli opera festival's center-piece at the revered historical site of Masada this month was a tale of betrayal, love and death in the shape of Italian composer Giuseppe Verdi's Aida.

The spectacular staging on the barren shores of the Dead Sea with the stark sandstone plateau as a backdrop, followed performances of Verdi's Nabucco at the same venue last year.

Masada strikes a special chord among Israelis. According to the ancient historian Josephus, it was the site of a Roman siege that ended in 73 AD when hundreds of Jewish rebels committed mass suicide rather than fall as slaves to the Romans.

In Aida, an Ethiopian princess kept as a slave in ancient Egypt chooses to die with her beloved, a young Egyptian warrior, after he is sentenced to death for betraying his country.

Members from Israel's opera perform Giuseppe Verdi's Aida during a dress rehearsal at the foothill of the historic mountain of Masada

At Masada, a huge stage was dominated by a Pharaonic statue. The open venue allowed American soprano Kristine Lewis who sang the title role to exit a scene on the back of a camel.

Israel Opera director Hanna Munitz said some 3,000 visitors from abroad bought tickets to the 12-day festival that began on June 1.

"(Had it not been for events in) Egypt, Libya and Syria, I think we could have had even more tourists coming from all over the world," Munitz said, referring to uprisings that have made the region appear more dangerous to visitors.

An Israeli Tourism Ministry spokeswoman said the number was down from some 4,000 who visited last year. The festival also includes a performance of another Verdi opera, Jerusalem, close to the walls of its Old City.

DESERT "MIRACLE"

Conductor Daniel Oren, an acclaimed performer of Italian opera, told Reuters the performances at Masada were "a miracle in the middle of the desert with ... the best singers in the world who perform at the Metropolitan (New York), in Vienna, in London."

Oren said that despite the technical shortcomings of Masada as a completely open-air site, it was a task worth pursuing because of the emotional ties with the venue.

"You cannot compare Masada even to the Arena di Verona which is a magical place where I conduct every year, but this is the most magical ... In Verona, the acoustics are there but here we have to create them with amplification," he explained.

Audience members at last week's dress rehearsal were impressed.

"It's a fabulous production. I think the word is 'dramatic', so much more than being inside. Just being here," said Aviva Lavi of Tel Aviv.

"It's a different experience. This is not an opera in La Scala or in New York's Met but it is a grand performance," said Ruben Shemer, who said he had seen many operas around the world.

Not all the reviews were positive. Critic Elyakim Yaron voiced disappointment that a "brilliant opera with incredible potential for theater should be performed on such a giant, empty stage."

Previous cultural events have been held at Masada, a UNESCO World Heritage site and for decades a source of archaeological fascination, but the opera festival is the most ambitious musical project there to date. ( Reuters )

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