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Title: wiped clean of all meaning
Review: I won't give a diatribe about the indecency of this production, the fact that there is some full frontal nudity on stage is not my objection. My problem is that the story has been completely stripped away in this production. The opera, as it was written, has a plot which may be silly, but which gives us an idea of 18th century European attitudes towards sex, intimacy and Eastern culture. In this production the plot is gone and the arias have been used as the basis of a set of essentially unrelated set pieces supposedly giving us insights into the nature of sexual relationships. The irrelevant action on stage simply distracts from the drama of Mozart's skillfully constructed arias and recitatives. The result is supposed to give a provocative view of sexuality, but to me seems to be utter foolishness. To sum up, if this sounds interesting, you might want to buy this DVD, but don't expect it to be a reasonable representation of the opera as Mozart conceived it.
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