Childhood play, leadership, suspense, thoughts of mediation and conciliation, Hamlet-like reflections on being and not-being, facing and conquering fears, and a hunger for stability and security in personal relationships, together with a full panoply of riffs on the colour yellow in European popular culture – many of them frankly unpleasant – are among the challenging ingredients of Stockhausen's Mittwoch aus LICHT, the last segment of the seven-opera LICHT jigsaw to be put in place. Stockhausen's operas are intricate literary puzzles or charades, every detail of which can be assigned a number of coded meanings. Despite bravura performances by an exceptional team of musicians, Graham Vick skated over much of the composer's uneasy symbolism in a brusque and simplistic arte povera production which, along with a battery of unsolved sound projection issues inherent in the score, placed altogether too much emphasis on the composer's dark side.