For the last 30 years of his life, Gyorgy Ligeti talked of composing an Alice in Wonderland opera. That never materialised, but now there is an operatic Alice, from a composer who studied with Ligeti and whose musical world comes closer to his than anyone else's. Unsuk Chin's work was intended for Los Angeles Opera, but travelled with conductor Kent Nagano to his new post as music director at the Bavarian State Opera, where the premiere is one of the highlights of this month's Munich festival.
For her libretto Chin and David Henry Hwang stick closely to the sequence and text of Lewis Carroll's novel, and add a real-world prologue and epilogue that turn Alice's experiences into a mysterious rite of passage. Much of the original text is kept, though there are some odd alterations. For instance, the "tea-tray" in the Twinkle, Twinkle parody becomes an "ashtray" for no obvious reason. Chin's music is a palette of exquisite orchestral writing - the Mad Hatter's tea party becomes a baroque scena, the Caterpillar's advice is delivered as a bass-clarinet solo, and the Mock-Turtle is accompanied by a melancholy mouth-organ.
Yet the production fails to do all this justice. Achim Fryer's clever-clever staging, with its multiple puppets and hordes of extras, tries too hard to compete with Chin's aural imagery, ignoring the out-of-kilter naturalism that's such an important ingredient of the Alice stories. The singers are arrayed along the front of the stage, hardly moving, and soprano Sally Matthews, as Alice, spends most of her time hidden behind a giant rag-doll mask. She is superb in a hugely demanding role, and the rest of the cast, including Gwyneth Jones as a raddled old Queen of Hearts, and Dietrich Henschel as the anguished Hatter, are first-rate too. A genuinely imaginative opera, overwhelmed by too many visual ideas.
· In rep from November 15. Box office: 00 49 89 2185 1920.