Contemporary Opera

[Schigolch]

Benoît Mernier, (Belgium, 1964) is a Belgian organist and composer, a former student of Philippe Boesmans, that, after working primarily in the field of chamber music, was given the job of composer-in-residence at La Monnaie, Brussels. He premiered there his first opera, Frühlings Erwachen, back in the year 2007. There was also another production in Strasbourg. There is a published CD/DVD:



The opera is based on a play by Franz Wedekind (author of Die Büchse der Pandora, (Pandora's box), that inspired Alban Berg's Lulu, one of the best operas of the 20th century). The plot is about some youngsters growing up, discovering sex, and the tragic suicide of one of them.

Mernier's music, at first, seems a little bit dry and monotonous. However, in a second hearing, some interesting findings reveal themselves. Vocal writing is nice, the singing and also the sprechgesang in the more dramatic situations.

A fine production, too. The first video is really good:

[Schigolch]

Anders Nilsson, (Stockholm, 1954) is a Swedish composer that has premiered some works in his native country. One of them is Zarah, based on the life of the actress Zarah Leander, during her years in Germany and her stardom in the Nazi period.



Though she is not very well know outside Germany or the Nordic countries, Leander was a big star back in the 1930s and 1940s. Her career was controversial because she was one the main attractions of the UFA, though Leander always said that for her it was just a job, and she never was a member of the Nazi party.

This is a Leander's movie:




The opera relates the last years of Leander in Germany, until her final exit in 1943. We can watch some scenes in youtube:

[Schigolch]

Like other soundtrack composers before him, Howard Shore decided to write an opera, and he chose The Fly, based on a movie by his friend, David Cronenberg. Shore himself had composed the soundtrack. The operatic libretto is by David Henry Hwang.

The premiere was at Théâtre du Châtelet, in Paris, the year 2008, and then it was also performed in Los Angeles. It was a relative failure with both critics and audiences.


We can hear the beginning of the opera:

The Fly - Shore

[Anne of Green Gables]

We can hear the beginning of the opera:

The Fly - Shore

Sounds pretty boring and uninspired indeed. If such stuff can get performed in Paris I'm feeling pretty sure about my own possibilities right now.

[AmericanGesamtkunstwerk]

Another one of LA Opera's attempts to gain cinema's favor is Goldenthal and Taymor's Grendel, which I would love to be able to see sometime. From reading about it, it could be splendid.

I would really like to catch Shore's Fly, ever since I first read about it when it came out before I was really into opera. That intro doesn't seem so bad, though the conducting could certainly be a lot more spirited.

[Schigolch]

I love Boris Vian's L'Écume des jours, a novel published in 1947, after the Second World War, that tried to capture the mood of the times, using the absurd as a tool.

If someone is not familiar with the novel, here is the plot: Colin is a young and rich man living with his servant Nicolás and a grey mouse. He falls hopelessly in love with a girl, Chloé, and they get married. Nicolás also lend some money to his friend Chick, an impoverished engineer, so he can also marry his fiancée, Alise. During Colin's honeymoon, Chloé gets sick, there is a water lily growing in her lung.

Meanwhile, Chick is getting obsessed with the teachings of the philosopher Jean-Sol Partre, and he invest all the money lent by Colin in buying thousands of copies of Partre's works. Alise, understandably dissapointed by this course of events. try to convince Partre to stop publishing, but the scholar refuses her, and Alise murders him and seeks further revenge burning his books in all the booksellers of the city, dying in the arson. Chick also meets his death in a clash with the police.

After Chloé's death, Colin ponders to take his own life, sitting beside the grey mouse...


Russian composer Edison Denisov, a big fan of Vian and French literature, wrote an opera in 1981 based on this material, to his own libretto (Colin and Chick are tenors, Chloé soprano and Alise mezzo). It was premiered in 1986, at Paris, and since then it can be heard only a few times. So few, that I have been unable so far to listen to the whole piece, as there is no recording available.

However, there is a suite of some 30 minutes, by the name of Colin et Chloé, but sung in Russian. We can hear this suite in the link below:


Colin et Chloé - Denisov

and also a brief fragment of the original, in French:

http://www.musiquecontemporaine.fr/r...93?language=fr

[myaskovsky2002]

I'm glad you suggested Laurent Petitgirard because unfortunately I can't get into the more 'avant-garde' operas as much as I want to, and I do try. It just isn't for me.

I'm quite interested in Laurent Petitgirard as well. While I quite enjoy any number of musical works that fall under the more experimental or avant garde rubric... including some operas, I have long despised the notion that the extremes of artistic experimentation represent the only art of any merit. The term avant garde is surely something of a misnomer as it denotes the body of troops heading in advance of the army as a whole... and yet none of us knows where music (as a whole) is heading.

One more experimental... and yet still exquisitely beautiful opera that I have come across is Pascal Dusapin's Perelà, Uomo di Fumo:

Attachment 42

The entire opera is actually available (right now) on YouTube (although it is just the sound... no video):

Thank you for the tip! I've just bought Guru. It is lovely.

Martin

[Schigolch]

Robert Ashley is one of the most personal voices in the American opera of the last 40 years.

His music, with an important electronic flavour, sometimes quietly repetitive, sometimes even surprisingly melodic, includes a fascinating exploration of the spoken voice, in contraposition to the standard operatic singing.



Perhaps the best introduction to his work is this Atalanta, first part of an intended trilogy that includes contemporary characters like painter Max Ernst, jazz pianist Bud Powell or Willard Reynolds, a relative of Ashley.

This stuff is mainly for lovers of avant-garde opera, but specially recommended for them:

Robert Ashley - Atalanta

If someone wants to get more information on Ashley, this documentary by movie director Peter Greenaway is available on youtube:

[Schigolch]

Rautavaara: Rasputin on DVD

There are at least two other contemporary operas on Rasputin's character.

In 1988 Jay Reise's Rasputin was performed in the New York City Opera. Perhaps some member of this forum will remember.

We can enjoy some fragments in youtube, from a staging in the Helikon Opera, Moscow:



Also we have Nicholas and Alexandra by Deborah Drattell, with a libretto by Nicholas Von Hoffman, premiered at Los Angeles Opera, in 2003.

Drattell, following standard operatic logic, was thinking to cast Rasputin as a bass. However, Placido Domingo wanted to sing the mad monk himself. Then, tsar Nicholas was also switched from tenor to baritone, and sung by Rodney Gilfry.

There is no youtube, but we can listen to the opera in the link below:

http://www.goear.com/listen/8003547/naa-naa

[Schigolch]

Many of Operalively members will have watched David Lynch's movie, Lost Highway.

Based on this movie, Olga Neuwirth wrote in 2003 an opera of the same title, with a libretto by the Nobel Prize winner, Elfriede Jelinek. Apart from Austria, there have been performances also in Germany, Switzerland, the US and the UK.

This is strictly for lovers of avant-garde opera, only.

[Schigolch]

Judith Weir (Cambridge, 1954) is a British composer and teacher, former disciple of John Tavener. In her career of more than thirty years, opera has always been present.



Her best operatic piece, in my view, is A Night at the Chinese Opera, premiered in 1987 with a libretto by Weir herself. The action takes place in 13th century China. In the second act a performance of a Chinese opera: "Chao's family orphan", is included on the plot, in which Chao, a civil engineer attending the performance, is trying to avenge his father, only to be executed before reaching his goal.

Apart from England, the opera had also been performed in the US.

Musically, the influence of Britten is paramount, as well as Stravinsky and sounds coming from folklore sources, of which Weir is particularly fond. The final result in this opera is really good.

We can hear below "Aria with rising floodwaters", from the first Act.

Aria with rising floodwaters - A Night at the Chinese Opera - Judith Weir

[Schigolch]

A Finnish friend sent me the DVD below with the opera Wallenberg, by the Estonian composer Erkki-Sven Tüür.



Tüür wrote the opera at the beginnings of the 21st century, and the DVD was recorded during a staging in Tallinn, the year 2007.

Raoul Wallenberg was a businessman from Sweden, working in Budapest during the Second World War, where he helped to save thousands of Hungarian Jews from the extermination camps, using the services of the Swedish Embassy. The Red Army detained Wallenberg in 1945, and charged him with spying for the US. He apparently died in a Soviet prison in 1947, though this has been disputed.

There is another opera on Wallenberg, written by Gershon Kingsley.

Tüür's opera was premiered in Dortmund. In the libretto, Wallenberg and nazi chieftain Eichmann are symbols of Good and Evil. The end is a little bit of a dissapointment with the death of Wallenberg, and the apparition of a new one, a kind of commercial icon. The score is rough, almost wild, with some pretty good choruses. The main roles, however, are not so well served as the choruswriting.

Interesting for modern opera aficionados.

[Schigolch]

Richard Danielpour is an American composer that premiered back in 2005 Margaret Garner. The opera itself is nice, but the libretto is outstanding. It was written by Toni Morrison herself, and the material was used before on her Pulitzer Prize winner, Beloved.

[Schigolch]

Bernard Herrmann knew a tremendous success as a soundtrack composer, but he was especially fond of one of his pieces, the best for him, this opera: Wuthering Heights.

Based on Emily Brontë's novel, the libretto was from screenwriter Lucille Fletcher, Herrmann's wife at the time. The opera was never premiered while Herrmann was still alive, but he paid himself the cost for a CD recording, in 1966. Operatic producers asked Herrmann to cut the score and change the ending, but the composer adamantly refused.

After Herrmann's death, the opera was finally produced but in a mutilated version, with more than 40 minutes worth of cuts. and a new ending.

At last, in April 2011, at Minnesota Opera, Wuthering Heights was performed with the original score.





I do think the opera well deserves a hearing or two. Best ever piece by Herrmann?. Possibly.

[AmericanGesamtkunstwerk]

Schigolch and company what do we know about Milko Kelemen's Apokaliptica with a libretto by Fernando Arrabal. as well as Ostfiend Busing's Guernica with libretto by the same