It could not appeal to headlines the way in which that its visible artwork and cinema siblings repeatedly do, however the Worldwide Pageant of Up to date Music has been a part of the Venice Biennale household of cultural occasions since 1930. It now takes place yearly throughout a fortnight in early autumn, and the composer Lucia Ronchetti is its present inventive director.
Music theatre options prominently in Ronchetti’s personal record of works, and it was no shock that she made it the theme of this yr’s programme. It was an acceptable theme for a competition in Venice too, for if town was not truly the birthplace of opera, it performed an enormous half within the early improvement of the shape.
As normal with the Biennale Musica, the emphasis was on model new compositions nevertheless it started and ended with revivals of works from the Eighties by this yr’s recipient of the Golden Lion for lifetime achievement, Giorgio Battistelli – his “instrumental theatre” Jules Verne, and the extensively carried out music-theatre piece Experimentum Mundi; later programmes included basic works by Mauricio Kagel and Georges Aperghis. My go to through the second week took in two of the main premieres.
Michel van der Aa’s The Guide of Water is the most recent within the Dutch composer’s collection of works combining video pictures, stay efficiency and electronics. It's based mostly on Man within the Holocene, a novella by the Swiss author Max Frisch, which tells the story of Geiser, a 73-year-old widower who lives alone in dread of shedding his reminiscence and attempting to carry order to what he is aware of, as his daughter desperately tries to contact him by telephone, and the rain falls steadily round his home.
Timothy West performs Geiser on the pre-recorded video, whereas Samuel West was the stay narrator, with a string quartet from Ensemble Fashionable offering the musical backdrop; the one singing comes from the soprano Mary Bevan on display as Geiser’s daughter, Corinne. As in Van der Aa’s earlier theatre items resembling Clean Out and The Guide of Disquiet (each of their other ways involved with reminiscence too), the combination of the stay and the recorded is immaculate, the cinematography coolly elegant, the dramatic remedy at all times barely indifferent. Although there's comparatively little singing, the insistent, hyperactive quartet-writing is ever current, changing into a extra apparent component within the dramatic scheme than it has been earlier than, although the interaction of the visible and narrative parts nonetheless appears extra essential.
Visions, by the Estonian Helena Tulve, hardly certified as dramatic in any respect in any typical sense. Nevertheless it was nonetheless an intensely theatrical expertise, because of the area by which the premiere occurred: beneath the dazzling mosaics and gold leaf of the basilica of St Mark’s. The textual content relies upon a manuscript of a “sacred illustration” (one of many renaissance precursors of opera) discovered within the archives of the Venetian church of Santa Maria della Fava, which Tulve has bulked out with liturgical music from the identical archive and extracts from the non-canonical Gospel of Mary, set within the authentic Sahidic Coptic.
The texts had been primarily allotted to a chamber choir (the very good Estonian Vox Clamantis, performed by Jaan-Eik Tulve) with different singers (members of the choir of St Mark’s, Cappella Marciana) arrayed across the galleries of the basilica. It’s a gravely lovely piece, whose extreme austerity (although by no means its musical language) generally recollects one other work premiered on the Biennale, Stravinsky’s Threni. A lot of the vocal writing is sparingly accompanied, both by an organ or a small ensemble of baroque devices that features two nyckelharpa (Swedish keyed string devices) and an Estonian kannel (reasonably like a zither or a psaltery), creating textures which can be delicate and fragile, whereas the minimally choreographed actions of the singers trace at some mysterious, timeless ritual.
As in any new-music competition there have been certain to be disappointments in addition to successes, and I additionally encountered two of these. A live performance given by college students of the Shenandoah Conservatory in Virginia was dedicated to choral music by Native American composers; the nations represented included Mohawk, Mohican, St’at’imc, Cherokee and Oneida, and the items included a specifically commissioned one by Brent Michael Davids. Regardless of the completed performances, which got a reasonably naively contrived “theatrical” setting, the programme sat reasonably oddly alongside the remainder of the competition. Nevertheless Yvette Janine Jackson’s “radio opera” Left Behind merely appeared ill-conceived. Carried out within the mainland city of Mestre, throughout the Venice lagoon, by Jackson’s personal Radio Opera Workshop Ensemble, it was purportedly involved with the “socioeconomic influence of area tourism on native communities close to launch websites”, however the banal fragments of textual content that emerged from the mush of electronics and seemingly improvised instrumental solos in the midst of the hour-long piece supplied no extra enlightenment.
Post a Comment