Mozart resonates with aftershocks of war

Dominated by divinely-inspired storms, Mozart's Idomeneo is about the importance of accepting fate, with its Biblical image of Idomeneo's sacrificial knife poised above the chest of his submissive son Idamante.

But it's also set in the aftermath of the Trojan war, and offers rich possibilities to any director who wants to key it into today. It was clear maverick director Peter Sellars would go big on its relevance to the war in Iraq. Moreover, with sculptor Anish Kapoor designing the stage, with choreographer Mark Morris creating the steps, with three of the world's best dramatic sopranos as Idamante and his competing lovers, and with Simon Rattle in the pit, this was undoubtedly going to be an event of some importance.

The curtain rises on a giant vortex strongly reminiscent of Kapoor's Marsyas, which last year filled Tate Modern's turbine room. Thanks to brilliant tricks of lighting, this is put through constant transformations, from a mistily insubstantial landscape, to a sandy shore, to a blood-red skull. Three black body-bags lie at the front of the stage: no surprise when the Trojan captives become grieving Iraqis, and their captors US marines. But this analogy feels unforced and organic, and remains so throughout the evening. Bad-boy provocateur Sellars has calmed down, and grown up. And in his presentation of Mozart's key soliloquies, Sellars has chosen an interesting theatrical mode: a dancer silently embodies their thoughts. With the Trojan princess Ilia's opening aria, the dancer is a mite distracting, but when Idomeneo sings of his fears for the as- yet-unidentified creature he must sacrifice, the shadowing faun poignantly bodies forth his grim imaginings. Sellars's trademark hand- ballets for the chorus - overdone in the past - are here forcefully expressive.

The one point where dance is misapplied is, however, a calamitous mistake. After the last notes have been sung, we get a 15-minute pas de deux that all but obliterates the drama which has just majestically unfolded. In Mozart's day this would have been presented as a series of masques, but here the audience are visibly restive. This should be cut forthwith.

In most other respects this is an absolutely stunning evening, with a haunted, sonorous Idomeneo from Philip Langridge, and the three sopranos each ravishing in their own way. Christine Oelze's Ilia has a piercing plangency, Anne Schwanewilms as Elettra alternates between silky seduction and driven fury, while the young Czech diva Magdalena Kozena makes a dazzling prince. And when all four deliver that divine quartet which had Mozart in tears, the world stands still. By turns delicately nudging and whipping up storms from the pit, Simon Rattle - after an unsure start - casts an exquisite Mozartian spell.

REVIEWED

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