Halmen, Pet (re)
Halmen, Pet (re)
Halmen, Pet (re), Romanian opera designer and producer; b. Talmaciu, Nov. 14, 1943. He received training in Berlin. After working in Kiel and Düsseldorf, he collaborated as a designer on productions with Jean-Pierre Ponnelle. Their staging of a Monteverdi cycle in Zürich in 1975 won critical accolades. From 1978 he was active at the Bavarian State Opera in Munich, where he prepared designs for the premieres of Reimann’s Lear that year and for his Troades in 1986, as well as for Wagner’s Das Liebesverbot in 1983 and Berg’s Lulu in 1985. His designs for Aida, in collaboration with Ponnelle, were seen in Berlin in 1982, Chicago in 1983, and at London’s Covent Garden in 1984, where controversy raged over his iconoclastic leanings. In 1987 he produced Lohengrin in Düsseldorf. With Ponnelle, he mounted a controversial production of Parsifal in San Francisco in 1988. After producing Paër’s Achille in Bologna (1988) and La straniera at the Spoleto Festival in Charleston, S.C. (1989), he staged Nabucco in Munich in 1990 and La clemenza di Tito in Toulouse in 1992. He produced Don Giovanni in Hamburg in 1996, followed by Orfeo in Halle in 1997, and Idomeneo in Salzburg in 1998.
—Nicolas Slonimsky/Laura Kuhn/Dennis McIntire