Coffee-Table Notes

When Kaija Saariaho’s final opera before her death in 2023 opens as one of the flagship productions in this year’s Adelaide Festival, its uncompromising portrait of the aftermath of a mass shooting ten years on should show why it has become a major international artistic event.   Innocence was written with a libretto by best selling novelist Sofi Oksanen, whose fusion of contemporary issues and Scandi-noir type thriller has seen her books, Baby Jane (2005) and Purge (2007), both adapted for opera. For Innocence, Oksanen sets out her store at a wedding for the family of the shooter where one of the victim’s mothers is working as a waitress. For Finnish mezzo-soprano Jenny Carlstedt, who plays the waitress, Innocence is a groundbreaking work.   “I think music should speak about the problems of our world right now, just as Mozart did with The Marriage of Figaro’ says Carlstedt. “I think we have to try to discuss things that are uncomfortable. Through art, we have a chance of appr...

A wealth of radical mavericks spans the centuries in this year’s Adelaide Festival opera programme. On the one hand, Igor Stravinsky’s The Nightingale is reinvigorated in a new production by Canadian auteur Robert Lepage. On the other, Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera is brought to vigorous new life by former Adelaide Festival director Barrie Kosky.   Just as Stravinsky, Weill and Brecht broke moulds and pushed boundaries in their respective eras, Lepage and Kosky have produced a succession of major works that have applied their own respective contemporary visions onto productions drawn from the classical canon.   Lepage’s take on The Nightingale – first presented by Stravinsky in 1913 -  is an international co-production between his own Ex Machina company with Opéra national de Lyon, Festival d’Aix-en-Provence, Canadian Opera Company and Dutch National Opera. In tune with this internationalist approach, Lepage is working with  Argentine...

Scary monsters and super creeps may have been in abundance on the Edinburgh Festival Fringe over the last month, but few looked like Sasquatch, the mythical man-beast brought to life as part of Summerhall's programme by Faith No More keyboardist Roddy Bottum in Sasquatch, The Opera. In what looked like a scaled down hour-long chamber version of Bottum's vision, the now completed run of Ahmed Ibrahim's production cast the forest-dwelling creature as a would-be tourist attraction exploited by a family of drug-addicted hillbillies who dress up their son as a cut-price version who never quite cuts it. When the family fall out and go their separate ways, the daughter of the family encounters the real thing, only for their budding amour to be nipped in the bud by a crazed pack of meth lab workers. While the daughter is reinstated into the so-called normal world once more, Sasquatch is left to run wild, free and ever so slightly sad. If the narrative sounds crazed, be sure tha...

It isn't immediately clear what's going on behind the big wooden double doors that lead into Scottish Opera's Glasgow rehearsal room. Inside, it's known that Vanishing Point theatre company director Matthew Lenton is rehearsing his production of The 8 th Door, a devised work created with Scottish Opera composer Lliam Paterson in a co-production between the two companies that marks Lenton and Vanishing Point's first foray into opera. The 8 th Door forms the first part of a double bill with Bluebeard's Castle, composer Bela Bartok and librettist Bela Balazs' blood-soaked one-act work, which was first performed in 1918. Outside, in the corridor, all that can be gleaned comes from a dissonant orchestral blare that seeps through the pitch-black that can be seen through the crack left between the doors. Once the music stops and the lights go on, things become more familiar. Two large screens are fixed at one end of the room, onto which are projected the close...

Going west isn't so much a perennial American pastime as a way of life. Ask Robert Ashley, the New York-based composer of spoken word opera, whose back catalogue over the past quarter of a century is largely made up of a mammoth trilogy of Perfect Lives, Atalanta - Acts of God and Now Eleanor's Idea, which obliquely maps out a cross-country quest in search of enlightenment. The final part of the trilogy is itself divided into four parts, each focusing on the response of one particular character after the banks run out of money. With the fourth part, Foreign Experiences, at Tramway for one night this weekend, some 15 years after its premiere, such prescience in relation to the current global economy is purely accidental. "When I started it," says 79-year-old Ashley in a slow, considered voice somewhat at odds with the 72-beats-per-minute tempo his work is scored for, "I was interested in the modern notion of religion in the US, where it seemed to ...

There has always been a musical pulse to Enda Walsh's writing, ever since the Dublin-born playwright burst onto the international stage in 1996 with Disco Pigs, his ferocious teenage love story that turned a nineteen-year Cillian Murphy into a star. The rhythmic rush of adolescent slang that fired Walsh's career-making play has led to a prolific canon both on stage and screen. Walsh's script written with Steve McQueen for McQueen's Michael Fassbender-starring film, Hunger, was praised, while a move into musical theatre with Once saw the Broadway production of a show featuring music and lyrics by Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova scoop eight Tony Awards, a Grammy and two Olivier Awards. Furthering his relationship with music, Walsh is currently under commission to write Jules in the City, a film based on the life and times of singer/songwriter Rufus Wainwright, a man himself no stranger to combining music and theatre. Then there is a mooted collaboration between Wal...

Enda Walsh has been spending a lot of time in hotel rooms recently. In New York, the Dublin-born playwright has been working with David Bowie on Lazarus, a new musical inspired by the alien character played by Bowie in Nicolas Roeg's 1976 big-screen adaptation of Walter Tevis' novel, The Man Who Fell To Earth. In Galway, Walsh has just premiered A Girl's Bedroom, a twelve minute monologue presented at Galway International Arts Festival as an installation to audiences of five at a time. And somewhere between Dublin, London and Edinburgh, Walsh is preparing for The Last Hotel, a brand new opera co-written with composer Donnacha Dennehy, who Walsh first worked with on a 2012 Galway revival of his 1999 play, Misterman. “I thought it would be good to try something that wasn't so narrative-driven,” Walsh says of The Last Hotel's creative roots. “I was really enjoying doing Misterman, and felt my work was changing, so when Donnacha turned round and said he had this ide...

When The Doors covered Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s ‘Alabama Song’ on their eponymous 1967 debut album, Jim Morrisson’s pseudo-Dionysian fairground ride suggested he’d been slumming it in fantasy-wish-fulfilment solidarity with the prostitutes and drunks who’d originally sung it. That was in ‘Mahogonny,’ the Brecht/Weill songspiel composed 40 years earlier and expanded to the full-length opera, ‘Rise And Fall Of The City Of Mahogonny’, in 1930. By the time Marilyn Manson sang the same song in 2003, he was following every would-be boho and back-alley cabaret turn from Bette Midler and a teutonically attired David Bowie flirting with decadent chic, to Swiss industrialists The Young Gods and The New York Dolls’ David Johansen. For maverick Austrian composer, performer and conductor HK Gruber, as a young man in the 1960s, it was the seminal recording by Weill’s wife Lotte Lenya that opened up his particular doors of perception. “She wasn’t a conventional opera singer,” says Gruber, ...

As operas go, it’s fair to say that ‘Porgy and Bess’ blew in like a hurricane. When George and Ira Gershwin’s self-styled ‘American folk opera,’ featuring a libretto by DuBose and Dorothy Heyward, who wrote the original novel and play that inspired it, appeared on the New York stage in 1935, its cast of classically trained African-American performers appeared to have broken the mould of so-called high art just as much as the show’s jazz and blues inspired songbook. But it was only 1976 that ‘Porgy and Bess’’ tale about a cripple living in the slums of Charleston, South Carolina, who rescues Bess from the clutches of her violent husband and a drug dealer, was accepted as a legitimate opera by way of a production by Houston Grand Opera. It was another nine years before it graced New York’s Metropolitan Opera. Today, and as Opera de Lyon’s Edinburgh International Festival production will no doubt testify to, ‘Porgy and Bess’ is regarded as a modern crossover classic. Yet for every wine ...