It’s been a long time coming but at last Ligeti’s 1978 “anti-anti-opera” Le Grand Macabre arrives on DVD in a revolutionary staging by Barcelona’s innovative urban theatre troupe, La Fura Dels Baus. Nekrotzar, the Grand Macabre of the title, arrives in Breugheland (inspired by the Dutch painter Pieter Breughel’s nightmarish visions), and announces the end of the world.  In the face of a population entirely absorbed with sex, alcohol and petty politics, however, his apocalypse fails to materialise and life goes on as before.  Very much an opera for today, I would argue.

This visually compelling production was a highlight of the 2010 Adelaide Festival and has been a hit wherever it has played. We begin with a giant video image of a woman watching TV, surrounded by cigarette ends and gorging on a burger.  A sudden seizure and she falls to the floor, her atrophied body metamorphosing into a giant three-dimensional set. This massive corpse is peopled by Ligeti’s grotesque cast of characters who crawl over her flanks, make love in her eye-sockets and enter her various orifices (even at one point from out of her giant vagina). Most remarkably though, the body is used as a giant projection screen to create a series of unforgettable images, especially those associated with Nekrotzar’s apocalyptic predictions.

The multi-national cast cope tolerably well with the English text and there are some memorable performances. Chris Merritt is a hoot as the lascivious, burger-munching drunk, Piet the Pot. Frode Olsen as Astradamors and Ning Liang as Mescalina relish their bondage games — he a hairy Charlton Heston in drag, she all botched cosmetic surgery with shrivelled breasts and a disturbingly prominent merkin. The marvellous Barbara Hannigan appears to sing the unsingable as a stratospheric Chief of the Secret Police. 

The work famously begins with a prelude for car horns and Ligeti’s score is a veritable musical grab-bag, mocking traditional operatic forms. Echoes of Tippett, Stravinsky and Birtwistle rub up alongside parodies of jazz, cabaret and Renaissance consort music. The vast orchestra includes harpsichord, bells and whistles plus cutlery, a frying pan and even a rubber duck. Conductor Michael Boder marshals this array with great aplomb while remaining sensitive to the singers, who are required to engage in some fearsome extended vocal techniques. Maybe not for the faint hearted then, but for anyone interested in what contemporary opera can achieve, this is a must.