Dusapin - Penthesilea review | Andrew Clements' classical album of the week

The Guardian 100

Petrinsky/Nigl/Van Mechelen/Montalvo/Opéra de la Monnaie/Ollu
(Cyprès)
The story of an Amazonian queen who falls in love with the warrior Achilles and violently kills him, Dusapin’s work is taut and compelling, lingering in the mind

First performed at La Monnaie in Brussels in 2015, Penthesilea was Pascal Dusapin’s seventh opera. Based on Heinrich von Kleist’s 1808 treatment of an episode from the Trojan war, it offers one of the alternative versions of the death of Achilles. In Kleist’s tragedy, Penthesilea is an Amazonian queen who sides with Troy and takes her warriors to fight against the Greeks. But she ends up as a prisoner of Achilles, with whom she falls in love, believing that she has defeated him. When she discovers the truth, though, she kills the Greek hero and joins her dogs in tearing apart his corpse, before killing herself in horror at what she has done.