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Review: ‘Turandot’ and ‘Les Contes d’Hoffmann,’ Spectacle and Substance at Bregenz Festival

Les Contes d’Hoffmann Choristers in Offenbach’s opera, with Pär Pelle Karlsson, center, as Stella at the Bregenz Festival in Austria.Credit...Karl Forster/Bregenzer Festspiele

BREGENZ, Austria — Opera at its best has always been spectacle with a brain. And nowhere is that marriage of seriousness and showmanship pursued more openly than at the Bregenz Festival.

At first glance the festival seems to be less a marriage than a juxtaposition, its offerings neatly segregated. Each summer an earnest, intelligent production plays inside the Festspielhaus, while outside, in front of 7,000 people on a stage floating in Lake Constance, the glitz is served: a gargantuan crowd-pleaser, stuffed with fire effects and dozens of extras.

This year the outdoor show is Puccini’s deliriously grand “Turandot,” set on and around a stories-high imitation of the Great Wall of China surreally bent into the exaggerated curves of a dragon. Inside is Offenbach’s “Les Contes d’Hoffmann” (“Tales of Hoffmann”), directed by Stefan Herheim, perhaps the most admired avant-gardist in opera today.

It seems like a typical Bregenz twofer, with your operatic superego sure to be charmed by the intellectual pleasures in the Festspielhaus, and the id sated on the lake. But this “Hoffmann” (seen on Thursday) and “Turandot” (seen Friday) turn out to have a great deal to say to each another. Both blend glitter and substance.

This isn’t entirely a surprise: Cerebral spectacle is Mr. Herheim’s stock in trade. A carnivalesque, campy mood reigns in his productions — the grinning, tuxedoed choristers of “Hoffmann” dance up a steep staircase with synchronized steps à la Busby Berkeley — but there’s rigor at their cores.

A poet, Offenbach’s Hoffmann (here the shining-toned, sometimes bracingly bitter tenor Daniel Johansson) seeks both artistic inspiration and love, but the women he pursues keep failing him. One is a robot who breaks, another a fragile girl who sings herself to death, the third a courtesan who can offer him nothing meaningful or lasting. Mr. Herheim asks how this face-off of the sexes might be different in 2015, as we contemplate a world in which gender identity has come to mean something beyond simply male or female.

Practically everyone on the Festspielhaus stage has a constantly shifting gender. Any given character is sometimes in men’s clothes and sometimes in a silvery torch-song gown, and often somewhere in transition, wearing a wig cap and a flesh-color bustier that recalls Caitlyn Jenner’s July Vanity Fair cover. This proliferation of vertiginous mirrorings — dozens of Hoffmann look-alikes — is appropriate to a work whose title character is undone when he realizes he can’t see his reflection in a glass. The shortcomings of Hoffmann’s women are here revealed as doubles of his own; the robot who crumbles at the end of this version’s Act II is a mannequin of Hoffmann himself.

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Mlada Khudoley in the title role of “Turandot,” on the floating stage at the Bregenz Festival.Credit...Karl Forster/Bregenzer Festspiele

Sex roles are blurred: Securely handled by the soprano Kerstin Avemo, the stratospheric notes of the automaton, Olympia, here corresponded to her thrusts as she mimed penetrating Hoffmann from behind. If it became difficult to distinguish Ms. Avemo from Mandy Fredrich, another lucid soprano who sang the doomed singer, Antonia, that was the production’s point, emphasized when Mr. Herheim had the two share the role of the courtesan, Giulietta. (Offenbach intended all three roles, as well as Hoffmann’s beloved prima donna, Stella, to be sung by a single soprano.)

In this staging there isn’t the typical clear distinction between these fleeting women and Hoffmann’s loyal friend Nicklausse (the sinewy, focused mezzo-soprano Rachel Frenkel), who doubles as the poet’s true muse. Here everyone — friend and foe — is pretty much equally sympathetic, even the baritone Michael Volle, who emerges from a seat in the audience near the start of the opera to join the action on stage, singing the work’s four villains with warmth, intensity and less malignancy than usual.

The show has a great deal of thoughtfulness and creativity, but less of Mr. Herheim’s characteristic enchantment; the set, designed by Christof Hetzer rather than one of this director’s usual collaborators, is efficient, not magical. Efficiency also characterized the conducting of Johannes Debus, who created a new version of the score with Mr. Herheim and the dramaturg Olaf A. Schmitt and led the Vienna Symphony with propulsive energy but not much atmosphere or detail.

Offenbach died before the opera was completed, and different stagings include different material, arranged in different orders. Few operas better represent a moment such as ours, when stability and long-held certainties are hard to come by, particularly in regard to sexuality. But out of all this disorientation arises Mr. Herheim’s note of hopefulness at the end, when the house lights go up and the company sings the final acclamation of love and music directly to the audience. If we’re all stranded somewhere on the gender spectrum, the director seems to be saying, at last we can greet each other as equals.

“Turandot,” conducted by Paolo Carignani, is also an unsettled score. Puccini died before finishing it, and we know it best in Franco Alfano’s completion, which combines reprises of earlier melodies with a meandering love duet for the icy princess Turandot and Calaf, the prince who wins her over.

Rather than smoothing over the work’s discontinuities, and its uncomfortable ethnic stereotypes, the director, Marco Arturo Marelli, draws attention to them by shuffling periods: The costumes sometimes reflect the libretto’s Orientalist vision of ancient China, and sometimes Europe at the time of the opera’s composition in the 1920s. It’s an odd, unexpected trick in a work that’s usually played straight, and it results in a “Turandot” that, like Mr. Herheim’s “Hoffmann,” revels in uncertainty.

Both productions present the composer as hero. Several small servant roles in “Hoffmann” are sung with charm by the tenor Christophe Mortagne, made up to look like Offenbach, with bushy whiskers and glasses; he presides smilingly over the action, conducting with his quill. In “Turandot” Calaf (the tenor Rafael Rojas, sounding tenderly intimate even in these daunting surroundings), with his neat mustache and ’20s suit, closely resembles Puccini, triumphing over death at the end.

The two shows, in their different ways and on their different scales, both mean for us to think about how a work of art is created and perpetuated. “Turandot” just does it with water cannons and hordes of acrobatic ninjas.

“Les Contes d’Hoffmann” runs through Thursday and “Turandot” through Aug. 23 at the Bregenz Festival in Austria; bregenzerfestspiele.com.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section C, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: Blending Brainy and Hearty in 2 Operas. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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