David Pountney never lacks ambition. So it’s no surprise that his first new staging as boss of Welsh National Opera is one of the big beasts of 20th-century opera: Alban Berg’s Lulu, a steamy stew of sex, murder, obsession, prostitution and the sort of “feminism” favoured by supposedly forward- thinking male dramatists of the early 20th century (in this case Frank Wedekind), in which the liberated heroine gets stabbed to death by Jack the Ripper as a reward for her free- spirited ways.
For all its vaunted proto-Freudian profundity, it is pretty sordid stuff. And Berg’s serialist music, full of mathematical permutations and palindromes, isn’t the epitome of easy listening either. One big strength of WNO’s production is that the conductor, Lothar Koenigs, aided