Alice in Wonderland

Ravel, Handel, Elgar, Stravinsky, a snippet of Puccini’s ‘Turandot,’ a bassclarinet homage to George Gershwin, glissandi, hints of musicals, film music and Gilbert & Sullivan – Unsuk Chin is a master of stylistic parody, but also much more than that: she is clearly at home on every highway and byway of music history. Yet the musical house she constructs with the building blocks of the past and the present is definitely her own house, which she has designed and which self-assuredly proclaims her unmistakable individuality and style. Director Achim Freyer, whose productions have been setting standards for decades, sees Chin’s opera as a collection of ‘dream sequences,’ for which he has created imaginary spaces: with the help of pulleys, acrobats depict the magical characters of Alice’s world and suggest the action through pantomime, and with the help of colorful masks and props.