Direct from America
Director Peter Sellars always has vertical hair and a friendly smile. The iconoclastic artist has also raised the hair and the ire of conservative elements of the classical music establishment since his arrival as enfant terrible on the US operatic scene. “Artistic vandalism” thundered Opera News after his radical staging of Mozart’s Don Giovanni at the Monadnock Music Festival in 1980. In Sellars’ production, set in an urban ghetto in the style of “blaxploitation” cinema, the promiscuous Don partied almost naked, shooting up heroin.
Four decades later, a laughing Sellars is unrepentant. “It’s so weird,” he says, “when people
