Moneim Adwan, Howard Moody, Dick van der Harst - Orfeo and Majnun
Festival d'Aix en Provence, 2018
Bassem Akiki, Airan Berg, Martina Winkel, Loay Srouji, Nai Tamish Barghouti, Yoann Dubruque, Judith Fa, Sachli Gholamalizad
OperaVision - 8 July 2018
The
Aix-en-Provence Festival is known for its adventurous approach to new
opera works and one of the finest and most surprising revelations was
bringing Arabic opera to the stage in 2016, with Palestinian composer
Moneim Adwan's Kalîla wa Dimna. There's always the danger that such
ventures will be seen as cross-cultural tokenism and fail to make a
wider impact, but if that's the case it's through no failing of the
quality of the pieces. Nor is it any failing of the Aix festival, who I
was delighted to see commission a new piece with Adwan, a composer of
real talent and musical storytelling ability who brings a colourful and
invigorating freshness to the world of contemporary opera.
While
the Arabian folk fable character of Adwan's Kalîla wa Dimna is very
much present in this new work, Orfeo and Majnun however is a
collaborative opera between Moneim Adwan and two other western composers Howard Moody and Dick van der Harst. Whether the collaboration is a genuine
attempt to further experiment with form and composition, or whether it's
an attempt to make the unconventional Arabian instrumentation more
accessible to an opera audience is debatable, but there is at least a
sense that the cross-cultural collaboration is compromised towards
tokenism in its presentation.
The story itself for
example is not just one story but two blended together to show a
common theme across cultures. From the Greek tradition there is Orpheus
and Eurydice, a popular subject for western opera from its very
beginnings, since it puts music and poetry together as an expression of
human endeavour and ability to strive to overcome seeming insurmountable
challenges, where love sets itself against death with the journey of
Orpheus to Hades. There's a similar treatment of those themes in the
ancient Arabic story of Layla and Qays. When Layla is forbidden to
marry her true love Qays, the young man becomes 'Majnun' (a crazy man),
writing poetry that charms the animals, but their love endures and Layla
remains faithful to her love until death.
The connection
between the two stories lies on a deeper level of two lovers who find a
distance between them that cannot be bridged. The commonality is made
clear in a number of overlapping scenes, Layla walking a distance behind
Qays in one scene while Eurydice follows Orpheus out of the Underworld,
but the distance of those few steps is nonetheless a huge gulf.
Orpheus's song charms Cerberus, the three-headed guard-dog of Hades, and
Qays likewise writes poetry that enchants and draws animals to him.
Love, represented in the abstract by music and singing (opera) is the
unifying force in both cases that enables man to exceed his human
boundaries and be capable of something greater, something written in the
stars.
Despite their commonalities, bringing them
together creates something of an Ariadne auf Naxos situation, another
imperfect matching of life, myth and art that was also part of this year's Aix
programme. While the stories should come together naturally, there is
however a clear division between the eastern and western
traditions in Orfeo and Majnun that is immediately marked by the
instrumentation and melody, each composer seeming to work on their own
alternating section of the work. If you listen closely however there is
some crossover of harmonies in the sections where Layla and Eurydice
meet and where the stories overlap, but it rarely does the piece really
feel like it has a single voice of its own.
Obviously
this is inevitable to some extent, as musical composition is rarely a
collaborative process in the opera or classical tradition, but the
narrative doesn't help matters. Martina Winkel's libretto does
unfortunately tells too much rather than let the story and the music
fill in the detail. It goes as far as including a narrator who explains the moral and the message throughout on the
common power of myth just in case you don't get it, as well as providing
a bridge between the two stories that as a consequence remain largely
separate.
Where it might have come together better also
is in the stage production. Directed by Airan Berg and Martina Winkel,
you can't say that they don't make every effort to provide a strong
visual presentation that attempts to integrate the stories. There are
abstract projections, giant life-size puppets of the animals, figures
with animal masks, puppet shows and shadow plays. The only thing
lacking is the character direction and singing, which mainly consists of
standing singing with heartfelt expressions and some dance
movements/yoga poses that don't really express the underlying sentiments
terribly well.
The need to ensure that everyone
understands the cross-cultural importance of the work also extends to
the make-up of the chorus and the orchestra, which combines traditions
as well as amateur and professional singers and musicians. While the
chorus is mixed age, the predominance of children's voices does make it
sound like a children's story, particularly when aligned with the moralising
narrative. The international composition of the Mediterranean Youth
Orchestra however are superb, creating a wonderful range of sounds and
melodies under the direction of Bassem Akiki, navigating the changing
moods and styles well.
I think it's important that the
Aix-en-Provence festival (and La Monnaie in Brussels who are one of the
co-producers here) continue to support innovation in contemporary opera
and seek outreach to a wider international audience of all ages, but the
creators of Orfeo and Majnun, Airan Berg and Martina Winkel, seem to
feel it is within their remit to make the cross-cultural message what
the opera is about and it feels a little patronising. Again however,
even if it highlights the contrast in approach more than commonalities,
there is much to admire in what Moneim Adwan's Arabic melodies and
storytelling have to bring to help diversify the language of
contemporary opera.
Links: Festival d'Aix-en Provence, OperaVision
Toshio Hosokawa - Matsukaze
La Monnaie-De Munt, Brussels - 2017
Bassem Akiki, Sasha Waltz, Barbara Hannigan, Charlotte Hellekant, Frode Olsen, Kai-Uwe Fahnert
ARTE Concert - March 2017
Using music as a means of bringing out or fusing the drama with another more spiritual dimension is I imagine is something that most opera composers attempt to do, but based on the few works that I've heard from him, it seems to me that Toshio Hosokawa manages to do this rather better than most contemporary composers. It's perhaps because Hosokawa shares an affinity with traditional Japanese Nôh drama, an aspect that was alluded to in Hosokawa's most recent opera, Stilles Meer, but which is even more apparent in direct adaptation in his earlier 2011 opera Matsukaze.
Still, it's not easy to translate expression of the stylised movements and gestures from Nôh to the western form of lyric drama, and it usually requires other techniques and instruments to bring out a sense of the other. Adapting two Nôh dramas in her 2016 opera Only The Sound Remains, for example, Kaija Saariaho made effective use of the otherworldly sounds of the Finnish kantele harp. Hosokawa often uses recordings of sounds of wind, rain and waves as well as other instruments to evoke nature, but he also makes effective use of other Nôh elements not commonly used in opera to such an extent: movement and dance.
And to that end, Hosokawa has dance choreographer Sasha Waltz as an effective collaborator and in La Monnaie an opera company willing to explore such new collaborations and extend the range modern opera by commissioning such experimental works. Musically, theatrically, dramatically, in terms of performance and yes perhaps even spiritually, Matsukaze is one of the most successful new productions of contemporary opera and its 2011 production revived here for La Monnaie's 2016-17 season demonstrates this beyond any question.
As with Stilles Meer, Hosokawa takes time to establish a sense of mood and place that is outside of the common experience and the common opera tradition. To the sound of wind through trees and the distant sound of the sea, grey and white clad figures spin, swirl, roll and interweave like crashing waves, crosswinds or perhaps invisible spirits. Into this space walks a priest (Frode Olsen), again singing in a manner not typical of the western tradition, but more like a ritual chant or prayer. Hosokawa paints the scene of this introduction with a flurry of percussion, shimmering strings and whispering flutes that gasp and blow.
In an adaptation of the original 14th century Nôh drama, Matsukaze relates the story of two women, Matsukaze (Wind in the Pines) and her sister Marasame (Autumn Rain), whose names the priest sees carved in a memorial on a pine tree. In a dream, the ghosts of the sisters tell their tale, how they became the lovers of Yukihara, a courtier exiled to Suma for three years. Soon after his departure, the women learned of his death and died from grief. Unable to let go of their earthly longing however, they are condemned to remain tied to the world of mortals.
Although the question of abandoning earthly attachments in order to pass over to another state of is an important aspect of the Buddhist doctrine, there doesn't appear to be any deeper message or moral to be drawn from Matsukaze than this. As in the original Nôh drama however, the true meaning or value of the work is in the ritual and the expression of the drama in performance, and it's here that Hosokawa's music conducted by Bassem Akiki, its use of sounds and silence, the dance moves of Sasha Waltz and the set designs of Pia Maier Schriever and Chiharu Shiota all create an effective environment for Barbara Hannigan and Charlotte Hellekant to struggle to cast off those powerful human emotions.
The darkened stage following the priest's discovery of the memorial to the women related to him by a fisherman, opens up (to the rippling of a stream) to reveal a webbed background of black threads, representing the seaweed that the women gathered, as well as a barrier that separates the spirit world from the world of mortals (not unlike the curtains and barriers in Peter Sellars' production of Saariaho's Only the Sound Remains). Scurrying high up in the tangle of the netting are Matsukaze and Marasame, who descend - their white robes turning to black robes - to re-enact the story of their own entanglement with Yukihara in the mortal domain that they have not yet escaped.
The production, like the original Nôh drama, uses a variety of means to relate the story and find other ways to delve beneath the surface and represent the less tangible emotions that are in conflict. Much of that in the opera is taken up by the dancers, some of whose movements and roles are somewhat abstract and difficult to define. One figure with his upper face and eyes masked could be 'blind desire'. The use of props are limited, but a hat left behind by Yukihara is used as a representation of Matsukaze's emotional attachment to the material world, which is also represented in the latter part of the production as a large boxed frame. Within and without this the dancers also shift and gather to form the pine tree that is a representation of Matsukaze's love. Her sister Marasame is able to resist being wound up into the tree and consequently succeeds in eventually passing over to the other side.
The role of the singers then is somewhat unusual as in addition to the considerable singing challenges and differences that define the two sisters, Barbara Hannigan and Charlotte Hellekant also have to move, interact and dance with these abstractions, fluidly moving from one state to another. Hosokawa's score, conducted by Bassem Akiki, also works fluidly with Sasha Waltz's choreography to give the simple tale of Matsukaze's fate a sense of momentum and urgency. Matsukaze's ghost would appear to be doomed to remain unable to depart entirely from the physical plane, but Hosokawa and Waltz suggest a more peaceful if unclear resolution as an older woman, dressed in white, moves slowly across the stage as all the other elements fall away into a silence broken only by the rippling of water.
Links: La Monnaie-De Munt
