Waiting for the Barbarians (complete opera)

"Dedicated followers of the Philip Glass fashion will want to get this two-CD set from Orange Mountain - because it's music by Philip Glass. The opera comprises two acts of 14 and 10 scenes and first performed in September 2005 at the Theatre Erfurt in Germany. It is well recorded here and can be recommended."
(ClassicalNet Oct 2008)

Philip Glass's 2005 opera, Waiting for the Barbarians is based on the 1980 novel by Nobel Prize winning South African author J.M. Coetzee, with a libretto by Academy Award winner Christopher Hampton (Dangerous Liaisons, Atonement). Waiting for the Barbarians is a harrowing allegory of the war between oppressors and the oppressed.

The protagonist is a loyal civil servant who conscientiously runs the affairs of a tiny frontier garrison town, ignoring the threat of impending war with the "barbarians", a neighboring tribe of nomads. But with the arrival of a special unit of the Civil Guard spreading the rumor that the barbarians are preparing to attack, he becomes witness to the cruel and illegal treatment of prisoners of war. Torture is used to obtain confessions from the barbarian prisoners, thus "proving" the necessity of the planned campaign against the tribe.

Jolted into sympathy for the victims, the old man decides to take a stand. He attempts to maintain a final shred of decency and dignity by bringing home a barbarian girl, crippled by torture and nearly blind, and subsequently returning her to her people - an act of individual amends. This dangerous, exhausting expedition brands him forever as a traitor, after which he himself becomes a victim of public humiliation and torture.

This live recording from a performance in Amsterdam in 2006 is performed by the company from the Erfurt Theater, Erfurt Germany, conducted by Dennis Russell Davies with Richard Salter as the Magistrate, and Eugene Perry as Colonel Joll.