Ian,

Thanks for posting this: i'll jump in and start things off with one of my knee-jerk responses (if that's not a mixed metaphor). Isn't the article in some ways sensationalising sentationalism?
Regietheater/Director's Theatre is a pretty wide-ranging phenomenon which has its successses as well as its outright failures: tarring it all with the same brush doesn't begin to tell the whole story.

By chance the last three operas I've seen have all been pieces I know like the back of my hand (Britten's MND, Turn of the Screw and Peter Grimes respectively), and all three were products of Director's Theatre. Two of the three made my blood boil: I've already briefly posted my thoughts on the travesty which was the ON Grimes, and the ETO's MND was destroyed by the director's concept that Puck himself was a mortal changeling who was now ready for retirement, so in direct contravention of the mercurial athletic music Britten provides for the character we had a tired old fogey who'd not have been out of place in Last of the Summer Wine. It's possible that one could make the concept work in the original play, but in the opera it was an idea which should have been smothered at birth. On the plus side, the Turn of the Screw (in the round with no scenery, hardly any props, updated to the first half of the C20th century, and kicking off with the idea that the children were already well on the way to adult knowledge) worked like a dream.

Doesn't it rather depend on the work, too? Works which have myriad layers of meaning (The Ring being an obvious example) will be far less damaged by such treatment than, say most Mozart works, where, in the main, the story is the librettist and composer's prime concern, rather than deeper philosophical levels. The article is rather misleading on the subject of the Chéreau Ring: yes, at first it was derided, but with later revivals it established itself as a much-admired masterpiece. The next cycle to be staged at Bayreuth, the Hall/Solti 'English' Ring, with its intentional return to 'realistic' staging (Rhinemaidens swimming in real water, etc.) and concentration simply on telling the story, suffered very badly by critical comparison.

 Where modernisation and conceptualistaion enhance the original work, I'm all for it: where it's just a gratuitous exploitation tacked on, then I'm most certainly against it. I've actually been in production of Bernstein's Candide directed by a Hungarian director who was as out of his depth as a frogman in a paddling pool (looking for depths which just weren't there); two days before the first night there was a cast revolt and the whole thing was dismantled and rethought by the cast and choreographer during a very fraught but eventually satisfying couple of days.

Do you mean: Although I have personal reasons for not wishing to contribute, I have noted the appearance of this thread?