★★★☆☆
Christian Thielemann donned Herbert von Karajan’s mantle in 2013 when he took over as the artistic director of the Salzburg Easter Festival, with his orchestra, the Dresden Staatskapelle, becoming the orchestra in residence. Now he’s gone one better — 50 years on from Karajan’s inaugural festival, Thielemann is heading a production of Wagner’s Die Walküre that recreates the designs for that staging, which Karajan directed.
It seems like a bizarre act of theatrical archaeology. Yet when the curtain rose on the mighty tree soaring up to the skies in Act I — as conceived by Karajan’s designer, Günther Schneider-Siemssen, and now reconstructed by Jens Kilian — the tingle factor was there. This handsome Walküre fills the huge space of Salzburg’s Festspielhaus without intellectual clutter.