This may save a lot of rehearsal time.
From today’s programme release:
When the Swiss composer Michael Jarrell came across Kassandra, a 1983 novella by the East German author Christa Wolf, his initial idea was to adapt it as a chamber opera with several roles. However, impressed by the complexity and intensity of the text, he eventually realized that he needed to concentrate on the “utter solitude of a woman awaiting death”, and that it would be “absurd” to make her sing about it. The result is a monodrama that can be seen as an “opera without singers”, thereby dispensing with the last hallowed convention of the genre. For Cassandra only the past remains: “There is no longer any reason to sing.” Jarrell’s music evokes a sense of entangled timelines with its range of tonal colours and rhythmic patterns. Through his use of self-quotation and allusions to works by composers such as Schoenberg, Bartók, Berio and Kurtág, Jarrell creates a densely woven fabric of old and new, against which Cassandra’s final reminiscences well up with haunting intensity. Bas Wiegers conducts Ensemble Modern; Dagmar Manzel narrates. The concert performance of the monodrama for narrator and instrumental ensemble with electronics takes place at the Main Auditorium of the Mozarteum Foundation on 23 July.
The post Salzburg puts on ‘an opera without singers’ appeared first on Slippedisc.
