Tag: Opera

CD Review, File Under?, Opera, Twentieth Century Composer

Michael Tippett – New Year (CD Review)

Michael Tippett 

New Year

Rhian Lois soprano

Ross Ramgobin baritone

Susan Bickley mezzo-soprano

Roland Wood baritone

Robert Murray tenor

Rachel Nicholls soprano

Alan Oke tenor

BBC Singers

BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, Martyn Brabbins, conductor

NMC Recordings

 

Michael Tippett’s final opera, New Year (1988) has finally been recorded. The work was produced in Houston in 1989 and Glyndebourne in 1990 and then fell out of the repertoire. The Birmingham Opera performed it last year, and the NMC double-CD recording is of a 2024 live semi-staged production by the BBC Scottish Symphony, conducted by Martyn Brabbins. 

 

New Year’s reemergence is propitious in timing. Combining elements of sci-fi, time travel, and fairy tales, it seems readily approachable for the streaming generation, with shows like Stranger Things, Time Bandits, and Severance providing a suitable backdrop. The opera also takes on social issues that remain important today, such as urban decline, poverty, racism, and Tippett’s ubiquitous concern for pacifism. However, the vernacular elements are the least successful of the piece, and the Jamaican accent adopted by one of the characters, Donny, played by baritone Ross Ramgobin, is cringeworthy today, and perhaps was back in the eighties too. 

 

Even by the composer’s standards, New Year is abundantly eclectic. Electric guitars, a large percussion section, and electronics combine with a traditional orchestra. Pop styles from the late eighties, notably rap and reggae, are enfolded in an otherwise modernist score with complexly chromatic parts for both soloists and chorus. The narrative itself is circuitous, with one part featuring a time traveling spaceship and the other a dystopian urban landscape. Thus, the challenges, never mind the costs, for any production are substantial.

 

Brabbins and company surmount most of them in a dedicated and well-prepared performance. The soloists are excellent, in particular soprano Rhian Lois, who plays the principal character Jo Ann, and Robert Murray, who plays the time traveller Pelegrin, both vibrant singers with considerable charisma to match their voices. Susan Bickley, the foster-mother to Jo Ann and Donny, is a warm presence, perplexed by their challenging behavior, agoraphobia for the former and misbehavior for the latter, and yet as nurturing as she can manage. The other time travellers, Merlin, played by baritone Roland Wood, and Regan, played by soprano Rachell Nicholls, provide excellent characterizations of their roles. Tenor Alan Oake as the Voice, the presenter of the action, is an authoritative presence. 

 

New Year is a multifarious and, in places, problematic piece. But one can scarcely imagine a better effort to present it to best advantage than this recording.

 

-Christian Carey



by Christian Carey
Classical Music, Concert review, Contemporary Classical, Festivals, New York, Opera, Vocals

Compelling and Visceral: “In a Grove” and Arooj Aftab at Prototype

In a Grove at Prototype Festival 2025 (credit Maria Baranova)

PROTOTYPE – OPERA | THEATRE | NOW defines itself as a “festival of visionary opera-theatre and music-theatre works”. Its presentation of In a Grove (January 16 – 19, 2025) was as close as Prototype comes to conventional opera in the context of eschewing tradition. It was also one of the most compelling productions I’ve seen in a long time. The intimate setting at La MaMa’s Ellen Stewart Theater augmented the visceral impact.

The story unfolded in four sections, each expressing a different character’s point of view of a murder in the woods. If that description sounds like the Kurosawa film Rashomon, it’s because that film was based on the same book: In a Grove, a century-old short story by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa.

The four singers: John Brancy, Chuanyuan Liu, Paul Appleby, and Mikaela Bennett, all excellent vocalists and actors, played multiple roles. Surtitles were projected above the stage, but for the most part they were not necessary to decipher Stephanie Fleishman’s effective libretto.

Christopher Cerrone’s melodic material was memorable without being trite. As I left the theatre after the performance, the haunting lament of the last scene continued to ring in my ears. Director Mary Birnbaum’s concept was exceptionally powerful in its simplicity, with no props and no set, save for a large pane of glass that glided in to bisect the stage at certain points. The glass panel also served as a mirror in some scenes.

Cerrone’s vocal score was accompanied by ten instrumentalists of the Metropolis Ensemble, led by Luke Poeppel (standing in for music director Raquel Acevedo Klein on the day I attended). The orchestration included some appropriately eerie effects, such as drawing a violin bow across the edge of a xylophone.

I was very much captivated by this powerful drama and its excellent performance.

The Pakistani-American singer and composer Arooj Aftab’s performance couldn’t be classified as an opera at all, though one can think of her concept album Night Reigns as a dramatic song cycle in the guise of pop culture. She appeared with her band for a one-hour set at HERE’s Dorothy B. Williams Theatre January 15 – 17.

Aftab’s style bridges world music and jazz with an ethereal aesthetic. Her presentation was casual and unusual – she distributed shots of whiskey to the audience in mid-show. It was also transporting; an atmosphere and music that took me out of the real world, and her clear lilting voice had an emotional impact. Never mind that most of the words were in Urdu. The meaning came across easily.

In this intimate space, seeing Arooj and her band – harpist Maeve Gilchrist, bass player Zwelakhe-Duma Bell Le Pere and Engin Kaan Gunaydin on percussion – was a visceral, and, enhanced by whisps of smoke created by dry ice, often ethereal experience.

by Gail Wein
CD Review, Contemporary Classical, File Under?

Brett Dean – Rooms of Elsinore (CD Review)

Brett Dean

Rooms of Elsinore

BIS CD

Jennifer France, soprano; Lotte Betts-Dean, mezzo-soprano

Volker Hemken, bass clarinet

James Crabb, accordion

Juho Pohjonen, piano

Andrey Lebedev, classical guitar

Swedish Chamber Orchestra

Brett Dean, violist and conductor

 

Composer and violist Brett Dean has spent a number of years engaging with Hamlet, creating a controversial, successful, and musically compelling eponymous opera premiered in the UK in 2017 and subsequently produced at the Metropolitan Opera. Rooms of Elsinore (BIS, 2024) collects pieces serving as character sketches written in advance of the opera, those recasting material from the opera that premiered concurrently or subsequent to its premiere, and new musical imaginings of Hamlet. It is fascinating to compare to the opera’s music, but one needn’t have heard it to find Rooms of Elsinore an engaging stand alone listen.

 

The vocal work And Once I Played Ophelia is sung by soprano Jennifer France, who is accompanied by the Swedish Chamber Orchestra, conducted by Dean. Its text is adapted from Shakespeare by Matthew Jocelyn, and it is a visceral piece cast in five movements. Interestingly, Jocelyn uses words that Ophelia says in the play and also lines directed at her (Hamlet’s “get thee to a nunnery”) The first section, marked “Fast, breathless,” is rife with stridency (a deliberate expression, not because France’s voice is anything but pliant) and intense, angular lines. “Hushed, distant, mysterious” begins with pianissimo utterances that indeed sound far off. Eventually, the singing moves closer in the soundstage, now lyrical yet enigmatic in expression. The third movement, marked “Fast, agitated,” uses the text “This is the ecstasy of love” as a recurrent motif that is elaborately described. France demonstrates adroitly rendered, ringing high notes alongside intimidating vocal fry. Dean employs brisk ostinatos with tritone weighted harmonies to add to the hysteria. It closes with a breathless recitative passage, as if all the energy has dissipated like the air from a balloon. The music moves attacca into the fourth section, “extremely still.” From questioning pianissimo to altissimo sustained notes, an entire range of expressive vocality is brought to bear in the “willow tree” text by France. The section concludes with a high register cello solo recasting some of the soprano’s music. The final section, “Slow austere,” begins by harmonizing the cello’s music with the string section, with clarion sostenuto lines followed by ones in supple decrescendo, employing the “Good night ladies … sweet ladies” text. The piece ends with a mysterious, thwarted gesture in the instruments. And Once I Played Ophelia … brings the listener straight into the soundworld of Dean’s Hamlet, and is superlatively performed by France and the Swedish Chamber Orchestra. 

 

Dean and pianist Juho Pohjonen play the duo The Rooms of Elsinore, each musically describing part of the castle. It begins with “I. The Dark Gate,” with descending scalar string lines set against sepulchral bass melodies in the piano. Gradually, the viola and piano crescendo and ascend together to their high registers. The viola then plays rhythmic lines against chordal sections in the piano, the stringed instrument bridging to the second movement with an altissimo ostinato. “II. The Four Gate Courtyard” continues the viola line alongside lush verticals from the piano amid tuplet flourishes. A gradual decrescendo closes the movement, only to be followed closely upon by “III. The Platform,” with a sliding tone abetted theme in the viola against repeated notes and arpeggiations, including a bass register flourish, in the piano. A pause is followed by the viola descending in sliding harmonics against low register punctuations in the piano. Open strings close the movement. “IV. The King’s Chamber” positively bustles with florid runs, pizzicato passages, ascending chromatic harmonies, and quick attacks. As the centerpiece of the piece’s seven-movement framework, it is the longest movement (4’02”), and also the most developmentally consistent, presenting as a rondo. Sustained viola with microtones and punctilious fragments from the piano are developed in “V. The Chapel,” while silences are interspersed by duo attacks in “VI. The Queen’s Chamber,” which part way through splits runs between them. The movement ends with repeated note passages and a chromatic viola melody contrasted with color chords in the piano. Rooms of Elsinore concludes with “VII. The Trumpeter’s Tower,” in which repeated bass notes in the piano are juxtaposed with high chords and a liquescent viola melody. A long decrescendo ensues, with high viola harmonics and a slowed-down set of piano harmonies.

 

Photo: Bettina Stoess

Gertrude Fragments is performed by mezzo-soprano Lotte Betts-Dean and classical guitarist Andrey Lebedev. “I cast thy knighted color off” begins the group with a wide-ranging, angular setting. Betts-Dean has a versatile instrument, with a strong lower register and blossoming high notes. The guitar part is well-crafted, with elements of lute songs alongside chromatic harmonies and modernist gestures, notably the acerbic attacks in the second song, “Wring from him my cause.” The texts are adaptations of statements by Hamlet’s mother, Gertrude. They are more aphoristic than the Ophelia texts, but still afford wide emotional range. The third song, “My too much changed son,” is melismatic, almost sobbing at its beginning before a sense of gravitas is regained. “How is’t with you?” is the shortest and sparest of the songs, almost a preparation for the concluding “If words be made of breath,” which includes plaintive sighs alongside glissandos. 

 

Bass clarinetist Volker Hemken performs Confessio, a ten minute long solo that references the entrance of Polonius. It is a technical tour-de-force, depicting the emotional tumult of the scene in lines throughout the compass of the instrument, special techniques, and a wide dynamic range. 

 

In the final piece, accordionist James Crabb is the soloist in the twenty-minute long concerto The Players. Material from the analogous scene in the opera included Crabb as part of the cast, playing alongside pantomiming actors. The concerto includes an introduction and closing material for Crabb added to musical material from the opera, deftly translated in its scoring for the ensemble. In the play/opera, Hamlet nearly loses control of his faculties, with manic explosions and a clear desire for revenge. The scene is depicted not only by the accordion, but taunting winds, bumptious percussion, and bitonal strings. 

 

The Players is an energetic closer for Rooms of Elsinore, an inspiring recording that suggests that Dean’s obsession with Hamlet may have room yet for more music about the dark prince of Denmark. If the works here are his last exploration of the play, Dean is still left with a tremendous legacy. One of my favorites recordings thus far in 2024.

 

-Christian Carey

 

by Christian Carey
BAM, Bang on a Can, Brooklyn, Chamber Music, Classical Music, Composers, Concerts, Contemporary Classical, Events, Experimental Music, Minimalism, New York, Opera, Percussion

A Short Piece about Long Play 2024

Long Play …. Not long enough!

This year’s Long Play schedule is particularly dizzying. The annual festival presented by Bang on a Can in Brooklyn, now in its third year, seems to have crammed more events than ever into its three day festival, running May 3, 4 and 5. For instance, on Saturday, May 4 at 2 pm, you’ll have to choose between a new opera by the Pulitzer Prize finalist Alex Weiser with libretto by Ben Kaplan, called The Great Dictionary of the Yiddish Language (at American Opera Projects) AND Ensemble Klang imported from the Netherlands playing works by the Dutch composer Peter Adriaansz (who has set texts from “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance”) at BRIC Ballroom AND vocal sextet Ekmeles performing music by George Lewis, Hannah Kendall, and Georg Friedrich Haas (actually at 2:30, but I imagine you’d have to get to The Space at Irondale early for a seat). A choice as difficult as any I’ve had to make at Jazzfest in New Orleans (which incidently is also happening this weekend, albeit 1000+ miles from Brooklyn).

Fans of Balinese gamelan music are in luck. A rare confluence of events provides the opportunity to hear two different ensembles, both free, both in Brooklyn, on Saturday. At 3:30 at the BRIC Stoop, you can enjoy the Queens College Gamelan Yowana Sari, performing with the percussion ensemble Talujon, along with the composer / performer Dewa Ketut Alit. Alit has come halfway around the world from Indonesia to Brooklyn for the premiere of his new work commissioned by Long Play. And at 5 pm the ensemble Dharma Swara performs at the Brooklyn Museum. Note: The Dharma Swara performance is not part of Long Play – it is a Carnegie Hall Citywide presentation.

Once your head has gone to Indonesia, you may want to continue on an around-the-world trip at Long Play. On Sunday at 2 at the Bam Café, hear DoYeon Kim playing gayageum (a traditional Korean plucked zither with 12 strings) along with her quartet featuring some New York jazz and classical luminaries.

Stick around at Bam Café after Kim’s set for another musician with sounds of a far-flung continent: At 3 pm the master kora player Yacouba Sissoko from Mali is joined by percussionist Moussa Diabaté. Diabaté is an internationally acclaimed dancer, choreographer, drummer and balafon player and together the two bring the sounds and culture of West Africa to us.

Come to think of it, when was the last time you heard music by Philip Glass played on accordion? Might as well settle in at Bam Café for the 4 pm show on Sunday, then, to hear a rare performance of the Polish virtuoso Iwo Jedynecki. Jedynecki has created some inventive arrangements of Glass’ piano etudes for button accordion.

The pinnacle of Long Play comes Sunday evening at 8 at the BAM Opera House, when the Bang on a Can All-Stars along with a bunch of special guests perform a seminal work by Steve Reich: Music for 18 Musicians.

by Gail Wein
Contemporary Classical, File Under?, Opera

Rhiannon Giddens sings “Julie’s Aria “from her new opera (Video)

Rhiannon Giddens, along with guitarist Bill Frisell and percussionist Francesco Turrisi, perform “Julie’s Aria” from Giddens’ first opera, Omar. Premiering at Spoleto, the opera is receiving productions at a number of prominent houses. Here is an audio stream via YouTube. Giddens is busy with myriad projects, but her singing is so compelling here: dare Spoleto offices hope for a cameo?

 

by Christian Carey
Contemporary Classical

Vivaldi’s Il Tamerlano (Best of 2020)

Il Tamerlano

Antonio Vivaldi

Bruno Taddia, Bajazet; Filippo Mineccia, Tamerlano; Delphine Galou, Asteria;

Sophia Rennert, Irene; Marina De Liso, Andronico; Arianna Vendittelli, Idaspe;

Accademia Bizantina, Ottavio Dantone, director

Naïve Vivaldi Edition Vol. 65

In recent years, there has been a reconsideration of Antonio Vivaldi’s stage works. A Vivaldi Edition is appearing on the Naïve label, its latest offering the pasticcio opera Il Tamerlano. Premiered in 1735 in Verona, the work contains arias by Vivaldi’s contemporaries Hasse, Giacamelli, and Broschi. Vivaldi composed recitatives and interludes and contributed several arias of his own. The various trunk arias may be from disparate sources, but the opera coheres around extraordinary vocal writing.

From top – Arianna Venditelli’s Idaspe, displaying extraordinary coloratura runs – to bottom – Bruno Taddia’s resonant yet flexible singing in the role of Bajazet – the cast is excellent. Particularly impressive is the countertenor Filippo Mineccia, whose wide-ranging voice drops into tenor chest notes and to the top of the staff for soprano register high notes. His tone is warm and portrayal poignant. 

Il Tamerlano is an excellent opportunity to hear Vivaldi’s music measured against other prominent opera composers of the day.The high quality of his stage works are becoming firmly established, and the selections by the other included composers suggest that there is still more fertile terrain to explore in Italy’s high baroque era. Il Tamerlano is Sequenza 21’s Best Opera Recording of 2020. 

-Christian Carey

by Christian Carey
Best of, CDs, Contemporary Classical, File Under?

Best of 2018: Holiday CD, Opera Recording

Best of 2018: Holiday CD, Opera Recording

Best Holiday CD

Nine Lessons and Carols: 100 Years

King’s College Choir, Stephen Cleobury, Director

Choir of King’s College label

 

2018 is the hundredth anniversary of Lessons and Carols at King’s College (and ninetieth year of radio broadcasts of the event). In order to celebrate, the Choir of King’s College has released a two-CD set of some of their most famous offerings from broadcasts over the years, as well as new music commissioned for the occasion. The release also celebrates Director Stephen Cleobury, who will be stepping down after an illustrious tenure with the group. Through the years, King’s consistent, extraordinarily high level of singing is truly dazzling.

Best Opera

Dr. Atomic

John Adams

Gerald Finley, Julia Bullock; BBC Orchestra, BBC Singers, John Adams, conductor

Nonesuch

 

The Nonesuch recording of Dr. Atomic, an opera about the atomic bomb test at Los Alamos, is the first audio release of this 2005 collaboration between composer John Adams and director/librettist Peter Sellars. The text is assembled from letters, declassified documents, and poetry (the first test’s site was named Trinity by Robert Oppenheimer, after a John Donne poem). An integral component of the love scene between the Oppenheimers (played by Gerald Finley and Julia Bullock)  is a poem by Muriel Rukeyser. An island of respite in the midst of the intensity of the test countdown, it is some of the most affecting music written by Adams. Elsewhere, the orchestra and singers are given plenty of opportunities for fiery declamation. The large ensembles work on many levels, expounding the famously divergent historical viewpoints surrounding the test, ratcheting up the intensity until the inevitable big boom. Adams conducts a powerful performance of his most visceral work.

 

by Christian Carey
CD Review, Contemporary Classical, File Under?, Los Angeles, Opera

Best Contemporary Opera Recording 2017 – Andriessen’s ‘Theatre of the World’

Louis Andriessen

Theatre of the World

Leigh Melrose, Lindsey Kesselman, Marcel Beekman, Steven van Watermeulen, Mattijs van de Woerd, Cristina Zavalloni, vocal soloists

Los Angeles Philharmonic, Reinbert de Leeuw, conductor

Nonesuch 2xCD

 

 

Dutch composer Louis Andriessen’s 2016 opera, Theatre of the World, subtitled “A Grotesque in Nine Scenes,” is a fantastical portrait of Seventeenth century polymath Athanasius Kircher. Commissioned and premiered by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, a recording of the live performance of this production was released in 2017 on Nonesuch.

 

In a nonlinear narrative propelled by effusively polystylistic music, played with assuredness and flexibility by LA Phil under the direction of Reinbert de Leeuw, Kircher’s thwarted late life ambition to find a theory for essentially everything is vividly but quixotically depicted. Among the variety of formal and stylistic devices are Renaissance style counterpoint and dances, post-minimal figurations, neoclassicism in the mold of Stravinsky, and oodles of pop ranging from Latin dances to doo wop to Krautrock. Amplified voices alongside acoustic instruments (apart from an electric guitar and synthesizer) allowing for even the most muscular sections of the orchestration never to overwhelm the singing. The vocalists are uniformly up for the significant demands placed upon them by the score. Particularly fine performances are given by Leigh Melrose in the title role, Lindsey Kesselman playing the boy/Devil, and Cristina Zavalloni as a nun who corresponds with Kircher, serving as intellectual foil, inspiration, and even at times confessor.

 

On a quest for knowledge, Kircher and his companions are misled by the Devil and periodically waylaid by witches and an ominous executioner: hence the grotesqueries. The production’s visuals apparently evoke nightmarish vistas, like an entropic funhouse full of circus mirrors. While a video recording of the opera would be a fascinating document, particularly if the production team were able to further enhance already significant onstage use of multimedia, one still gets a strong sense of the its atmosphere from the audio recording alone. That said, even with libretto and booklet notes in hand, the quick shifts between characters and of plot, demeanor, sung language (I counted seven), and musical tropes makes Theatre of the World a formidable piece to ascertain. Those willing to provide an attentive ear will find themselves richly rewarded by Andriessen’s compelling use of the aforementioned plethora of material to stymy stale operatic conventions and, in their place, embrace a richly hued, multimedia theatrical environment. Theatre of the World is the most imaginative and ambitious piece that LA Philharmonic has commissioned and presented to date. Nonesuch’s excellent CD of it is my pick for Best Contemporary Opera Recording 2017.

-Christian Carey

by Christian Carey
Contemporary Classical, Opera

Horror in Opera, in Virtual Reality: The Parksville Murders

To open with a broad stroke, opera is generally seen as a medium that embraces tradition. For example, while the repertoire certainly has a myriad more terrifying works to offer, the Royal Opera House offers Don Giovanni and Macbeth as selections from their Top 5 Scariest Operas article. Bearing this in mind, I couldn’t help but appreciate the particularly rich novelty of fitting my smartphone into a specialized cardboard case to watch the first ten-minute episode of The Parkside Murders, the virtual reality horror opera.

The first episode of The Parkside Murders fully embraces its medium as a VR experience, and uses the unique strengths of VR to tell this story. While appreciating opera and cinema are traditionally group experiences, virtual reality (for now anyway)  is solitary by nature. Furthermore, the fixed perspective of traditional mediums allows for a layer of separation as an audience member that this VR experience sheds. Rather than treating this experience as a 360-degree film, The Parksville Murders forces you into drama immediately, establishing the viewer as a named character in the opening supertitles. Before learning the names of our protagonists, you learn that you (yes, you) are The Watcher. As this episode unfolds, The Watcher, unable to move anything below the neck, begins to wonder what their role is in this story. The lack of autonomous mobility in this visceral, 3D environment is frustrating, but a constant reminder that The Watcher is not here to help, harm, or change. The Watcher exists to bear witness. After being directly addressed by the supertitles, and later by one of the main characters, Watcher is left wondering about the nature of their role in this narrative. This isn’t a question one generally runs into in cinema, or opera. Director Cari Ann Shim Sham* transforms several formalist techniques prevalent in horror films such as frenetic editing, use of visual and aural white noise, and frame-rate manipulation in their adaptation for a VR experience. The line between the story and its telling is blurred, and opens up a floodgate of possibilities for storytelling in this medium.

Virtual reality aside (or about as far aside as it can be moved from the main focus) The Parksville Murders is, afterall, an opera. Scored for soprano (Corinne, played by Kacey Cardin), mezzo (Sarah, played by Mikki Sodergren), a small chorus, and electronics, composer Kamala Sankaram incorporates music in a way that is always in service of the drama, and mounting sense of dread. In this episode, the electronics are a clear backdrop for more interesting musical material: Sankaram’s vocal writing and extended use and manipulation of diegetic sound. Sounds of white noise from a nearby television set, sharpening knives, and nearby knocking are deeply embedded into the work, and had this Watcher constantly inspecting their surroundings in horrified anticipation. Sankaram’s vocal writing is, aptly, the cornerstone of this score, and well supported by Cardin and Sodergren’s excellent performances. Captivating in its own right, one begins to notice that Sankaram’s approach to vocal writing itself is being used to tell a story. Cardin’s initial plea of “Help me, help me…” (a plea made directly to The Watcher) is eerie, angular, and immediately stands in stark contrast to the electronic droning that comes before it. Later, the surreal nature of Sodergren’s entrance “on screen” is mirrored in Sankaram’s writing for her character. While Cardin sings at a slower, measured pace, often repeating words and small phrases, Sodergren sings parlando, often speaking in full sentences. The contrast between our two leads leaves so much room for uncertainty about what exactly The Watcher is bearing witness to. Again, it is hard to know where the story ends and its telling begins. The differences in the text setting between these characters and Sankaram’s blending of diegetic and nondiegetic sounds certainly leaves room for this story to dive deep into the realm of the supernatural, but it is too soon to tell.

The first episode of The Parksville Murders is available now exclusively on Samsung VR, and it is well crafted, immersive, and genuinely scary. Recommended. During the daytime. With the lights on.

http://www.theparksvillemurders.com/ 

by Cortlandt Matthews
Brooklyn, Composers, Contemporary Classical, File Under?, Interviews, Microtonalism, New York, Opera

Friday: Ueno Opera at Sawdust

At National Sawdust on Friday April 7th at 7 PM, Opera Cabal presents the premiere of Ken Ueno’s new opera Aeolus. Joined by vocalist Majel Connery and Flux Quartet, Ueno performs throughout the opera. His fascinating blend of vocal techniques includes microtonal inflections, megaphone-amplified directives, and throat-singing. Electronics, video projections, and an architecturally conceived set design converge to make Aeolus a potent multimedia concoction. I recently caught up with Ken as he was in the thick of preparations for the opera.

Hi Ken. Thanks for taking the time to talk with Sequenza 21.

 

Why are you calling this an opera instead of some other genre? As you well know, multimedia theater pieces are called all sorts of things…

 

Following the examples of Monteverdi, Mozart, and especially Nono, “opera” seems to be an open enough label, if we need a label, so I hope it’s appropriate for this piece.  But you’re right – I don’t really know what to call it. It doesn’t have a regular narrative. It features two voices that are in distinct contrast to bel canto singing. But I am attached to the possibilities Prometeo opens up, so if Nono’s is an opera, then, Aeolus, can be an opera too, right?  Aeolus does feature a suoni mobili (Nono calls the movement of sound the main drama in Prometeo) characteristic in that, in the guise of Aeolus (the ruler of the winds), I move around the hall, directing my non-semantic vocalizations with a megaphone to articulate the architecture, the space, as an instrument.

You’ve mentioned that there are autobiographical elements in the libretto. Since it is fairly nonlinear in terms of narrativity, would you like to share how some of your own history fits in?

 

Memory is non-linear.  Spaces between texts and texts in memory become islands in search of a place in time, an ostensible home, which the idea of a Penelope represents.  My biographical circumstance is that my family moved around so much during my formative years that I don’t have a normative sensation of a home. So, the idea of a home is a mythic space for me, one I’ve also begun to associate with not only a place, but also specific people with whom I shared lived in those spaces that felt like places to which I belonged. That’s also, I think, why James Joyce resonates so powerfully in me. If there is a main narrative in Aeolus, it’s the counterpoint between the semantic and non-semantic in search of a home.

 

If I may, here’s an excerpt of a draft I’m writing for something else, which elaborates on this:

 

My own language acquisition parallels Dedalus’ in that the trajectory from babbling to fluency did filter out a palette of sounds that were extraneous to language. As a baby, I remember understanding language before I could actually speak. I remember both the frustration of not being able to communicate, as well as the tiny victories when I somehow managed to reach out and get through – sometimes purely through the inflections of non-semantic vocalizations, maybe combined with clear physical gestures like pointing or shaking my head.

When I was four, my family moved to Switzerland, and apart from speaking Japanese with my family I was a mute child again, unable to speak the local French. The burgeoning richness of my internal life was frustrated by this communication setback. Around that time, I was given a portable Aiwa tape recorder and started to make non-linear musique concrète, playing with snippets of sounds of my little world in exile. Listening to those recordings now, through auto-archaeology, I discover not only that I was vocalizing non-semantically, but that I was singing multiphonics. I was babbling, testing the limits of my vocal repertoire, expanding the repertoire of sounds my body could make. Unhinged from semantic obligation, I was freely playing at making sounds for the pure sake of making sounds, developing a series of dexterous moves ancillary to spoken language – to logos. I remember how it felt. The complex vibrations of the multiphonics reverberated in my body, shaking my bones. It was soothing. I learned to make a variety of sounds that registered different feelings. They felt like different weights of the world. Not being able to speak the local language, not having any friends, I was performing, rehearsing for my future self. The future will rationalize the past. When I read James Joyce as a teenager, the tropes of alienation and exile, and the distance between language as sound and language as semantic medium, all resonated with me.  

Tell us about your collaborators.

 

Majel Connery is my singer.  Though classically trained, she has a beautiful lyrical voice, that reminds me of Elena Tonra from Daughter or Beth Gibbons of Portishead. But that’s really unfair. I should not be naming names or comparing her to anyone else – she has a great voice, she is a primary referent in her own right. When I heard her voice and imagined what it was capable of, I knew I wanted to write songs for her. Songs that would carry the semantic exposition in Aeolus. She’s been very generous with me in trying out sketches of my songs in different keys, etc., so that we can get to the right voice/word combination to get to the pathos that I want to express. Majel is also a brilliant project leader. She is Opera Cabal. She is our fearless leader and most responsible for all of this happening. A visionary!

 

Thomas Tsang is a brilliant architect with whom I have been collaborating for ten years.  We met as fellows at the American Academy in Rome, and we’ve collaborated on installations ever since. As an artist, he brings a fully-fledged multidisciplinary edge to architecture. He questions traditional outputs and bravely creates installations, events, workshops that challenge us to rethink the history of specialization in our related fields.  The full vision for the opera is to have a space that he designs that is something more than a set or venue, something more integral to the expression of the piece. We are working towards that.

 

Erin Johnson is a video artist with whom I have been collaborating over the last few years. She’s an all-round creative force. Many of her works thread the line between video art, installation, performance art, curation, and community engagement. She naturally problematizes categories in her artistic output. She curated a work of mine last summer – Fortress Brass, a site-specific piece that took place on boats and then at Fort Gorges in Portland Harbor, in Maine. Erin made videos for four of the scenes in Aeolus, for scenes with voice-overs. Voice-overs take the place of dialogue in Aeolus (a move that I first began to experiment with in my first opera, Gallo). Being pre-recorded, the voice-overs inhabit a different time/place: it serves a distancing function.

 

I am also lucky to be working with the renown Flux Quartet. Specialists in the extreme demands of new music, breathtaking in their courage and inspiring. I am blessed to have this team.

 

What are some of the electronic elements in the piece?

Mostly, the electronics are backing tracks for the pop songs.  In one scene, I perform with a Max patch that the brilliant designer/composer Ilya Rostovtsev made for me. The patch lets me use my iPhone as a controller for algorithmic drums.

 

What does lateral bowing sound like? You’ve become a big fan of it … how did you first discover it as a technique?

 

I like lateral bowing because it sounds like breath – the link between my vocal practice, my body, and the embodied choreography of sounds that I notate for instrumentalists to perform.  I first came up with lateral bowing, when I was experimenting on a viola during the composition of my viola concerto, Talus.

 

What’s next for you?

 

I’m lucky to have pieces upcoming for talented friends: a piece for five-string baroque cello for Elinor Frey; a solo trumpet + electronics work for Andy Kozar; a solo cello piece for Jason Calloway; a saxophone piece for Vincent Daoud; a trio for Kim Kashkashian; and a long overdue piece for piano for Kathy Supove (and some other things too).

https://vimeo.com/196345650

by Christian Carey