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This Opera Ballet Vlaanderen extravanganza is Bruegel gone psychedelic. Staged at the opera house in Ghent, where the original 16th-century story is set, its citizens oppressed under Spanish occupation, Franz Schreker’s 1932 “magic opera” tells of Smee the Blacksmith’s (“Der Schmied”) Faustian pact. He negotiates untold wealth not with the devil but his mistress, Astarte, she of the diabolic eyes; Satan himself towers monstrously over proceedings, his palace a riff on Ghent’s medieval Gravensteen castle. So far so local, but Ersan Mondtag, in his opera directing debut, boldly draws a parallel with Belgium’s later colonial history, suggesting that, in time, the oppressed become the oppressors. The music stops altogether for Patrice Lumumba’s speech proclaiming Congolese independence, and Smee – sung by the brilliant Leigh Melrose – ends up as King Leopold II, desperate to get into heaven. Schreker’s score is eclectic, his own libretto often comic. Mondtag makes it zany and outrageous, but his indictment of empire-building and its atrocities is searing. It inevitably invokes, too, the Nazi era, which spelled the end of Schreker’s hitherto illustrious career. (Available until 6 November) Rian Evans
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