(Credit: Monika Rittershaus)

Barrie Kosky’s new production of Philip Glass’s 1983 opera “Akhnaten,” running through April 20 at the Komische Oper Berlin, represents a long-overdue homecoming. This is the city most intimately connected with “Akhnaten’s” historical legacy; the archaeological treasures of the enigmatic Pharoah’s destroyed city, Tel-El-Amarna, excavated by Ludwig Borchardt with funding from the philanthropist James Simon in 1912 – and which includes the world famous bust of Queen Nefertiti – are among the main treasures on Museum Island. 

Kosky is one of contemporary opera’s most prodigious, influential, and prolific directors. During his decade as the Komische Oper’s artistic director (2012-2022), he raised the company’s artistic standards and its international profile. He also brought his sharp and decidedly crowd-pleasing (though never pandering) sensibilities to everything from Baroque opera to 20th century masterpieces and gained particular fame for deliriously overstuffed productions of little-seen Weimar-era operettas. Since stepping down as the Komische’s chief, he’s returned to direct productions of the musicals “La Cage aux Folles” and “Chicago,” as well as Stephen Sondheim’s gleefully gruesome “Sweeney Todd.” 

“Akhnaten” (1984) is the culmination of Glass’s “Portrait Trilogy,” which began with “Einstein on the Beach (1976)” and “Satyagraha” (1980). The Komische production marks Kosky’s first time directing an opera by an American minimalist. In bringing it to the stage, he finds a crystalline simplicity to match both the expressive and focused music and the tight narrative, based largely on ancient texts, including in Akkadian and biblical Hebrew, collected by the scholar Shalom Goldman and organized by Robert Israel, Richard Riddell, and the composer.  

Consciously eschewing Egyptological accoutrements, the production opts instead for visual restraint and gestural precision. The largely abstract aesthetic – with dashes of Robert Wilson and Romeo Castellucci – often feels like a rebuke of Phelim McDermott’s circus-like, juggling-heavy spectacle for the English National Opera and the Metropolitan Opera. 

Kosky emphasizes the ritualistic quality of the opera through the frequent, intensely physical and, at times, hieratic movements of the soloists, the mighty chorus, and seven dancers, who are credited, along with the director, with choreographing the Bewegungssequenzen (“movement sequences”). The stage design, by Klaus Grünberg, who also did the bold lighting, is an open white space that draws the audience into Glass’ hypnotically beautiful soundscape. With simple, at times enigmatic, props, frequently exposed lighting fixtures, and a glacially rotating stage, Kosky’s production employs stark imagery to enhance the emotional resonance of the opera’s cyclic, trance-inducing rhythms and arpeggios. Kosky harnesses the width and depth of the white empty stage, frequently isolating performers within geometric forms of light and shadow, which echo the opera’s themes of spirituality and transcendence. His choice to make the narrator a disembodied amplified off-stage voice heightened the ethereal atmosphere of the production.  

Far from static observers, the chorus, clad in black, become a dynamic force within the narrative, embodying both the collective consciousness of Akhnaten’s followers and the shifting tides of societal and religious transformation. Their presence amplifies the opera’s ritualistic aspect, turning each scene into an evocative ceremony. Their seamless integration into the staging recalls Kosky’s dexterous handing of large choruses in Arnold Schoenberg’s “Moses und Aron” (2015) and Hans Werner Henze’s “The Bassarids” (2019), two of his finest and most memorable productions at the Komische.

Credit: Monika Rittershaus

In the title role, American countertenor John Holiday’s performance is marked by extraordinary agility and a resonant timbre that captures Akhnaten’s reformist impulses and spirituality, as well as the character’s androgyny – an attribute that the production highlights by garbing him in elaborate and colorful dresses (costumes: Klaus Bruns). He sings a robust and glistening “Hymn to the Sun,” (the opera’s only conventional aria) in English with striking clarity and eloquence.

Susan Zarrabi brings warmth and coloristic variety to Nefertiti, especially in her poignant and intimate Act two duet with Holiday. Sarah Brady is similarly sensitive as Queen Tye, particularly in the opera’s haunting final scene, a powerful tableau in which the trio’s mummification is staged with evocative solemnity – and which the soloists sing from the sides of the balcony in the auditorium.

Jonathan Stockhammer, who conducted the electrifying Berlin performances of Belgian choreographer Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui’s production of “Satyagraha” in 2027, was back at the Komische to preside over another magisterial performance of one of Glass’s finest scores.  The American conductor led a highly controlled account that was richly detailed, with particular attention paid to the celli and the woodwinds. Only early on, notably during the funeral of Amenhotep III, was there an imbalance between pit and stage, with the orchestra drowning out house bass Tijl Faveyts, who sang Aye (Nefertiti’s father and advisor to the Pharoah) and somewhat overzealous drumming. But for the most part, the Schiller Theater, the West-lying theater that is the company’s temporary residence while their historic home in the East is under construction, proves an acoustically-sound match for Glass’ music. 

Glass’s complex rhythmic structures and repetitive motifs emerged with clarity and flowed with ease thanks to Stockhammer’s meticulous direction and to the Komische Oper Orchestra’s careful and committed playing. As with “Satyagraha,” his approach allowed the audience to grasp the work’s rigor and depth. And like the production that unfurled onstage, it highlighted the work’s meditative intensity without sacrificing dramatic propulsion or coherence. 

The contrast to gaudy spectacles like McDermott’s production or overtly political ones, like Achim Freyer’s original Stuttgart staging or a more recent one by Laura Scozzi at Theater Bonn in 2018 was striking. Kosky’s interpretation, rooted in introspection and aesthetic clarity, consciously avoids sensationalism and favored elegant, evocative visuals and gestures to bring out “Akhnaten’s” sharp musical and theatrical focus. 

It also made for a wild contrast to Deutsche Oper Berlin’s controversial production of John Adams’ “Nixon in China” – a staging criticized by Adams himself for its overstuffed aesthetic and interpretive liberties – which was revived in early March. The presence of two operatic masterpieces of American minimalism at houses less than a mile from each other in the German capital suggests a newfound acceptance of these works by German institutions who once viewed them skeptically. It’s very heartening to know that space is being made for Glass and Adams alongside Henze and Wolfgang Rihm in the cultural guardians’ definition of “Hochkultur.” 

It seems increasingly illogical that Kosky has yet to direct an opera stateside. (Plans for his Munich “Fiery Angel” to be staged at the Met were scuttled by the pandemic.) New York audiences will get a rare taste of Kosky next month when his production of “The Threepenny Opera” from the Berliner Ensemble comes to BAM for a mere four performances. He has never been as ubiquitous on Europe’s opera stages than he is now. At the Komische, a further 10 productions by him will be staged this season and next. Currently, at the Wiener Staatsoper, his recent Mozart-Da Ponte trilogy is being performed in its entirety. In Munich, where his seventh production (of Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Christmas Eve”) arrives next season, his stagings of “Die Fledermaus,” “Der Rosenkavalier” and “The Cunning Little Vixen” are currently in repertoire. And in May, his “Ring” cycle continues at the Royal Opera House in London with “Die Walküre,” to be followed in June at the Salzburg Whitsun Festival by “Hotel Metamorphosis,” an Ovid-themed pasticcio of music by Vivaldi that Kosky has devised for Cecilia Bartoli, the festival’s artistic director. At the Komische, the entire eight performance run of “Akhnaten” sold out shortly after the mid-March premiere. Not bad for a 20th century opera never before staged in Berlin! 

America’s opera houses, which are seemingly in a perpetual state of crisis, ignore Kosky at their peril.