Hottish on the heels of the William Kentridge designed and directed Wintereisse at last year’s Sydney Festival comes The Dark Mirror, a staging of Hans Zender’s 1993 ‘composed interpretation’ of Schubert’s greatest song cycle for tenor and chamber orchestra. Both stagings take a multimedia approach with ample use of video projection, but there much of the comparisons end. Zender’s reworking of Schubert is a whole new musical ballgame, while director and designer Netia Jones’ involving dramatic approach integrates her soloist – in this case a hauntingly tormented Ian Bostridge – more tightly into the overall conception than Kentridge did with his equally enthralling singer, Matthias Goerne.

Where Kentridge layers his vision on top of Schubert, Jones takes Zender’s extraordinary reimagining of the original as her starting point, to devastating effect. Starting deep inside the 26-piece orchestra with the sounds of trudging feet – more Foley realisation than music – the crystalline score glitters with icy spiccati and the tinkling of harp. Fragments of Schubert wheel in the air like the obsessive repetition of a scratched record, while Bostridge’s narrator sits staring mutely off stage. As memories are dragged painfully back...