The two brothers have covered much of the same repertoire in their long careers, but whereas Christopher's operatic settings place greater emphasis on his characters' emotional range, David's protagonists are more broadly caricatured and his productions far more politically charged.
Their father was the playwright Jerome Alden, and their mother was the ballerina Barbara Gaye, who danced in the original productions of On the Town and Annie Get Your Gun with Ethel Merman.
In 1976, he visited Europe where he immersed himself in the cultural stream of contemporary opera directors the likes of Giorgio Strehler, Harry Kupfer, Hans Neuenfels and Ruth Berghaus.
His first European production in the late ‘70s was a Rigoletto for Scottish Opera that, he says, was assailed by the critics because "in England, it was still very early to speak directly to the audience with the style I was attempting and place passion and schizophrenia on the stage.
As John Rockwell noted in The New York Times, "Alden's staging… (is) indebted to Expressionist films like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, full of stark silhouettes and lurching zombies.
At the end of Act II when the hero Kochubey and his friend Iskra are dragged to the executioner's block, Alden shocked his audience with a gruesome chainsaw massacre that set the tone for the bloody mad scene in Act III and forever enshrined his production in the minds of London opera goers as "the Chainsaw Mazeppa" that "became a sort of shorthand for the entire Jonas project — brutal, uncompromising, unmissable, the ultimate succès de scandale.
Over the next decade, Alden continued in his role as provocateur and key collaborator of the ENO Power House with Giuseppe Verdi's Simon Boccanegra and Un ballo in maschera, George Frideric Handel's Ariodante, Hector Berlioz' La Damnation de Faust, Richard Wagner's Tristan und Isolde and more recently, a 2006 production of Leoš Janáček's Jenůfa that won an Olivier Award for Best New Opera Production.
"[6] His first production of Richard Strauss' Salome in 2006, presented in Lithuania, eschewed the biblical timeframe of Oscar Wilde's original for a more contemporary, Soviet era setting exposing "fifty years of occupation, suppression and persecution" with Herod portrayed as a debauched "dictator who senses the approach of the end of his regime.