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Barbara de Limburg, designer
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Barbara de Limburg designs for both theatre and opera. She collaborates regularly with director Laurent Pelly, designing beautiful and imaginative sets that are in harmony with and complement fully his concepts and direction. Current and recent work includes Humperdinck’s Hänsel & Gretel for Glyndebourne Festival, Janacek’s Cunning Little Vixen for Saito Kinen Festival and Maggio Musicale, Massenet’s Don Quichotte for La Monnaie Brussels and Cendrillon for Santa Fe Opera, Royal Opera House Covent Garden and Gran Teatre del Liceu Barcelona. |
'Pelly and his set designer Barbara de Limburg Stirum don't force the analogies - the scenario seems to evolve quite naturally out of both the source in Grimm's fairy tale and our current crop of child-based anxieties. And the points aren't crassly rammed home - the production is bizarrely beautiful and very funny, using some simple but eternally effective theatrical trickery'
'The production was also greatly enhanced by Barbara de Limburg Stirum's sets, which follow Pelly's direction into the inner recesses of childhood imagination. Hänsel and Gretel's home is an outsized cardboard box, the forest is a desolated, wasted landscape, where the stark branches of dead, leafless trees are littered with discarded plastic bag'
'Massenet's "Cendrillon” turned out to be the high point of the company's 50th- anniversary season. With a clever, stylish production by Laurent Pelly (stage direction and costumes) and Barbara de Limburg (sets), …Talk about going back to original sources: this production was text-driven, in the sense that the words of Perrault's fairy tale were everywhere -- reproduced on the walls, on the furniture, on some of the costumes, in a carriage formed in the shape of the word "carosse." The color scheme was black, white and brilliant red, and witty visual touches abounded.'
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Hänsel und Gretel, with designs by Barbara de Limburg, is available on DVD