Frederic Wake-Walker

Frederic Wake-Walker is a British director who works across opera and theater, often known for inventive, non-traditional stagings. At The Cleveland Orchestra he directs a staged presentation of Richard Strauss's Die Frau ohne Schatten, a large and symbolically dense opera about a supernatural empress who must gain a shadow, a fairy-tale stand-in for the ability to have children.

Wake-Walker's work tends to favor imaginative, stripped-down staging over literal fairy-tale spectacle, an approach well suited to Die Frau ohne Schatten, an opera built on symbol and transformation rather than a straightforward plot. Strauss wrote an enormous, richly colored orchestral score for it, one of his largest, using it almost as a character in its own right alongside the singers. Expect a production that leans on the orchestra's scale and color to carry the story's supernatural elements, since the plot itself, about an empress trading a shadow for the power to bear children, resists realistic staging. Listen for how the orchestra shifts between lush, glowing passages and darker, more unsettled ones as the story's moral stakes rise.