Munich.

The first Bavarian State Opera Summer Festival under the artistic direction of Kent Nagano took as its theme The Dialogue of the Cultures, opening symbolically June 28 in Munich's new Jewish Cultural Centre with a lecture by sociologist Richard Sennett. The theme was even more dramatically embodied in the two new operas produced in Munich this season by the company, both conducted by Nagano.

The Japanese-American maestro commissioned Das Gehege (The Enclosure) from the German composer Wolfgang Rihm as a forepiece to Richard Strauss's Salome, receiving from Rihm a monodrama for Gabriele Schnaut, based on a story by Botho Strauss, in which a woman frees an aging eagle (portrayed by a dancer-actor, Todd Ford) from a zoo, obsesses over it and finally, when it reluctantly attacks her, kills it.

Although interestingly paired with Salome as a companion study of the terrible consequences of obsession and an effective late-career vehicle for Schnaut, Das Gehege lacked the musical interest to merit repertoire status, a condition shared by the season's other new opera, premiered during the festival, a setting in English of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland by the Berlin-based Korean composer, Unsuk Chin.

Imaginatively produced by Achim Freyer, with the singers almost immobile and the action given over to puppet figures, the opera boasted an effective Alice in Sally Matthews and an ebullient Queen of Hearts in the veteran soprano Gwyneth Jones, but in spite of many inventive touches of parody, the score itself covered more often than it illustrated or enhanced Carroll's words.