King Arthur

King Arthur was Purcell’s biggest triumph as a composer for the theatre, enjoying revivals throughout the 1690s and well into the following century. Its patriotic content was doubtless a contributory factor, but probably more telling was the way Purcell’s music so consistently hit the target in the aspects that matter most. Of his four semioperas, this is the one which engages most intimately with the emotions and situations it depicts, showing off not just his spontaneous tunefulness and compositional skill and daring at their best, but also his dramatic genius at its most inspired. This production by Sven-Eric Bechtolf and Julian Crouch is one of the most riotous and theatrically bold things attempted in Berlin over the past decade, with a level of sumptuousness and constant invention more regularly associated with Barrie Kosky’s spectacles for the Komische Oper.