The story is less important than the gallery of character studies that furnish the work, and for which Boesmans has given ample voice in a work whose four acts include some two and a half hours of music. As is the case in any opera based on a play, musical time being far slower than spoken time, the narrative is subjected to severe tightening. The role of Autolycus is one casualty, but a quintet is a classic musical method of compressing information, and the oracular voice declaring the innocence of the supposed adulterers is heard but not seen. One invention is a vagrant narrator alternately named Green or Time, both superbly handled by the veteran character tenor Heinz Zednik. The Triumph of Time'' is the apparent source of the play.
Time is the time that heals all wounds.
Florizel is sung by the rock musician Kris Dane, who wrote a couple of his character's songs, and these scenes also involve the improvised services of the rock trio Aka Moon. Otherwise, Patrick Davin was in solid command in the pit, and Bondy's staging was efficiently unobtrusive. The main element in Erich Wonder's sets was a wall of ice from which Hermione's statue returned to life when Leontes recovered his senses, and Rudy Sabounghi's costumes were as timeless as the play itself, as were Lucinda Childs's choreographic elements. The excellent cast was headed by the Finnish baritone Juha Kotilainen as a magnificently raving Leontes, Susan Chilcott radiant as the wronged and deeply frozen Hermione, Cornelia Kallisch powerful in her repeated denunciations of the demented Leontes and the tenor Anthony Rolfe-Johnson was moving as the aggrieved Polixenes.