ClassicalQueer podcast August 2021

I was lucky enough to be a guest on ClassicalQueer's Podcast with Sammi Jane Smith & Jacob Caines.

I got the chance to talk about my music, my practice as a musician and programmer, and talk about the queer threads that influence my creativity.

ClassicalQueer is a space to highlight the lives of 2SLGBTQ artists working in the classical arts. CQ interviews musicians, poets, theatre workers, administrators, conductors, dancers, and anyone else that has an interesting story. Be sure to check out their Facebook and Instagram, and below is a link to all their other awesome podcasts.

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A composer a week: Marko Nikodijević talking about his opera about Claude Vivier

“Strange, beautiful, excessive. Those are the words that come to my mind when thinking about Vivier. (...) Stopped and inverted decays, frozen resonances, delays and echoes, processes recalling granular synthesis, all there to simulate an ever-changing room-size and spatial form, inter-cut with dance-club episodes.“

I have written about Vivier’s opera, Kopernikus here, feel free to have a read.

The Artistic Tyrant & Rare Opera Club, Vol. 8: Chaya Czernowin's Infinite Now

The meeting of the sort-of-weekly rare opera club has been such a great way to get through the pandemic. We have watched a wide variety of works, many I wouldn’t normally engage with. And the discussions that arise from them are fascinating. I want to acknowledge some of these excellent people I’ve been sharing ideas with in the group - composer Kym Dillon, flutist Kim Tan, pianist Dean Skye Lucas, singer Heather Fletcher, singer Daniel Todd, director Daniel Sinfield and singer and performance coach Cailin Howarth.

One recent discussion was from viewing Chaya Czernowin’s Infinite Now. This is a remarkable piece of theatre. The discussion we had with this piece touched on how many modern “operas” are really difficult to categories. The term opera doesn’t really fit with many pieces, and this one. The whole experience is extraordinary and I would recommend you engage with the piece. I would love to experience it in person. The video did not give it justice, especially from an aural perspective. There is an incredible patchwork of sound going on, and I felt that I needed a better acoustic to experience the stunning complexity. I would also recommend this lecture from Chaya about the piece.

I’m not going to do my usual exploration of the composer and the piece for this blog post. I still feel this work is settling in me, and I haven’t gotten to the core of my response to it.

However, I do want to talk about one ideas that was raised in our club meeting - that of the artistic tyrant. In the video below, I was really pleased to witness the collaborative nature of Chaya and the work with other artists involved in the project. It sparked a discussion around the joy in the room one could feel toward the piece and the collaboration. It opened and enlighten some thoughts I have been having recently around collaboration and cooperation in artistic work, which is probably the thing I miss most of all about working from home and having no live performances to experience at the moment.

While I was completing my masters in conducting, we would often talk about how the age of the tyrant was over. Art organisations have been corporatised, and with that came more power to the musicians, the representation to management and the presents of unions. The famous stories of the great artistic tyrants of the past, Gustav Mahler being a well known one, can no longer happen. Organisations no longer allow the bullying behaviour that was accepted, only until relatively recently. Sometimes you get people talking about how this may mean that we wont have genius’ again, but it’s interesting to unpack that parallel. Does a “genius” artist have to be this sort of Beethovenian torched artists, fighting for their vision? I think in the age of post-modernism there isn’t a place for that, and now days people just won’t put up with pretentious, dictatorial visions.

I feel we learn and are encouraged to collaborate and negotiate more as artists, especially as musical performing artists dealing with big groups of experienced individuals. I had an experience while completing my masters where an experienced conductor of youth orchestras completely grilled me while I was on the podium in front of an orchestra, completely belittling me of any respect that the group of my peers had for me. I had and have respect for this person and their work, but I had always questioned their work manner - yelling at people in rehearsals, lack of reasoning or negotiation in their teaching method and a very unapproachable manner if you weren’t a favourite. I learnt a lot from this person in my undergraduate, both about music but also how not to run a rehearsal. But, this run in during my masters really winded me. It lead me down a path to questioning my ability to conduct work from the cannon (it was Beethoven’s Eroica that we were doing in the masterclass). In the long run this has lead me to a very fruitful path in contemporary music (most likely because I find it a much more collaborative and welcoming environment, and I just like the music more). But it’s a shame to think that all the potential I had for focusing more on the cannon went with a few disparaging remarks, made with little tact and no sense of care as a teacher. I am made of pretty tough stuff and it certainly didn’t disparage me from my path as a musician, but as I said it did effect my approach to conducting works from the cannon. It did also have some positive outcomes - it challenged me to go out and try and better my lack of knowledge for those areas of music, and it galvanised me to get better. But to this day I often think about what if this person encourage and taught me, rather then ridiculed me for my opinion? The opinion I had at the time was wrong and didn’t have correct musical judgement behind it, but instead of guiding me to a different opinion or suggesting other options it was insinuated that I hadn’t received the right sort of education. It was a glimpse into a very old fashioned value system, peppered with snobbery, status and power.

I hope to think that we have a more collaborative understanding about how to learn and how to work with people and that no one experiences what I did. It taught me a lot, but at the expense of a lot of my confidence. It also showed me about how a lot of the classical music world operates, or used to operate and how that effects structures and systems still in place in the community now. Again I feel that contemporary music is inherently more open, optimistic and pluralistic and is a huge draw card to me and the way I want to work, rather than trying to dismantle and work against the artistic tyrant legacy.

Rare opera club, vol. 7: Peter Eötvös' Angels in America

What a poignant time to watch this work. I have known about the amazing Tony Kushner play, Angels in America for a long time and have loved it’s amazing ability to marry real life characters (if you don’t know about Roy Cohn, have a read it’s fascinating), this magical bizarre dream world, realism, religion and poetry into an epic celebration of the power of humanity and the growing liberation of queer people as members of the human race.

Stepping into watching the operatic version of the play, I had some apprehension in case it was a similar experience to Alice In Wonderland, where my expectation of the work and knowledge of the source material led me to be very disappointed. But luckily I wasn’t. The shimmering, dreamlike music that pours throughout the score was exquisite and mated the dreamlike, cheekiness of the libretto. The original 7.5 hour play is condensed, I think quite well, into 2.5 hours of opera. The level of emotional directness opera can deliver gives you a directness and immediacy that words can’t give you. In the operatic version they steer away from a of the political elements of the play and just focus more on the character. But through that you still get a really genuine vision of New York City in the early 90s and the plight of queer people, who only recently have received close to the same rights as straight members of the community.

At the centre of the work is the power of death, in the form of AIDS. Watching this poetry of death, with people experiencing visions and predictions of the future world unfolding before them, my thoughts quickly fell onto what we’re experiencing with Covid19, and how will we attempt to depict the current epidemic in poetical terms and what can it mean for humanity. The injustices faced by many of the characters in Angels in America rang so true with so many of the difficulties we face with Covid19. Angels in America is almost seeped in the uncertainty of the future; the future of those suffering with AIDS, the challenge and transformation this put against religion as the world became more progressive and the prospect of a huge, plague and the fall of the atheist Soviet empire.

One aspect of this opera, and perhaps the original production and cast that I watched contributed to, was the depth and breadth of the characters I saw on stage. So often with opera, and especially new opera, I find it so hard to get more than just the music. Acting, as we know, is often the second cousin to the singing in opera performance, but this work really provided me with rich, nuanced and big characters. Perhaps it also had to do with the large sections of the score that were spoken and not sung, or spoken in a rhythmic speaking type technique. The text setting was also generally in the middle range of the singers, closer to their speaking voice and more easier to understand, except for the angels who were more operatic and otherworldly. This perhaps helped push the real focus I felt on text. And it should be noted the amazing quality of the english text setting, and done by someone for whom the language was a second one to them!

I would love love love to see this done in Australia. We have such amazing talent for a work like this. Alas I don’t see any of our major companies taking that risk anytime soon.

Rare opera club, vol. 6: Henryk Penderecki's The Devils of Loudun

Sex, possession & nuns - how could you not love it?

Penderecki isn’t a composer I’ve had the pleasure of exploring too much, outside of the big famous pieces. So I was really excited to dive into his first opera, The Devils of Loudun. This piece went onto to be influential on the 1971 film (with music with Peter Maxwell Davies) The Devils by Ken Russells. Russells spoke about the opera influencing the world of the film.

I really loved this opera. Politics, sex, horny priests, possessed nuns, it’s really got something for the whole family. Jokes aside, it delves into a world that explores 17th century France where politics, women and the power of society appears to be so different to ours, but in reality is such a strong criticism against oppression, dominant governments and the role and power of a women’s body.

This was the aspect that I found most interesting. In our club meeting I mentioned that if this piece was written 50 years earlier than it was (1968) it would come across as reasonably anti-women. But for some reason, it being created around the time of the sexual revolution painted these women in less of a hysterical, crazed women of patriarchal dominated western literature, and gave an eerie beauty to their inner psychology and confused sexuality.

Another interesting aspect to our conversation was the talk around politics, religion and women. It was really fascinating to tease out the idea that the man at the centre of the opera, who is accused of being the devil and possessing the nuns, didn’t do it and was put in that position from politics. And it touched on the nepotism and abuse of power the church had, and can still have on women and the attempts of an individual against the system. When it was premiered, the work had great controversy with the church. But I think its the classic case that it’s not the religion that is in question, it’s the church and the systems put in place that benefited the church for so long. And this was usually at the cost of individual freedom and progressive values.

The music itself is fascinating. The sound world explored in the more intimate moments is basically chamber music, with some amazing writing for Double Bass. The bigger action and crowd scenes have huge orchestral forces, utilising some amazing techniques for the orchestra. The chorus and soloist writing is epic. So many solo singers! And in the version I watched, a TV adaptation of the world premiere production from Hamberg State Opera, some amazing moments to act - the libretto isn’t contrite or awkward, it gave the singers an opportunity for real emotional depth, comedy and convincing melodrama. A work like this teeters on the extreme edges of emotion. It could almost be silly, but it manages to stay inside a unique, tense box that keeps you on your toes. It has comical, dark moments, but is always clear to its vision and tells the story amazingly well, especially with such large forces.

I’m especially happy to have explored this fantastic, wild and deep music as the maestro passed away in March this year.

#opera #operaclub

Rare opera club, vol. 5: George Benjamin's Written on Skin

George Benjamin is a composer I’ve know about for a long time, but I haven’t really known the music. When I was about 15 I found a CD at an op shop that was originally a promo CD given with a magazine. The CD was a compilation of tracks from newly released recordings. From what I can remember the CD contained track’s from a recording of the Verdi Requiem, a lied by Gustave Mahler, a scene from Benjamin Britten’s Albert Herring and a piece by Lutoslawski, among others. All these were very new to me and really opened my eyes up to new sonic worlds I hadn’t been exposed to before. The most arresting piece on the CD was the second of the Three Inventions by George Benjamin. The fresh and subtle music of this piece really intrigued me. It had an extended solo for Cor Anglais (and now that I think about it, this might be where my obsession for the Cor Anglais as a melismatic solo instrument came from) accompanied by a lot of percussion and pizzicato strings. It was an intimate work, a solo voice framed by small bursts of cacophony and rhythmic complexity.

I had a compendium book called something like The Great Composers or The History of the Great Composers, which I devoured cover-to-cover. This little CD put sounds too many names I had read in this book. However, there wasn’t an entry for George Benjamin. His name remained there in my mind, until I got to university and was able to listen to his first opera Into the Little Hill, which has stayed with me since. Though looking back now, I wonder to myself why I didn’t look any further into his work? Especially as I was verging of obsession over Olivier Messiaen, George Benjamin’s teacher.

Now I should say that Written on Skin really isn’t a “rare” opera as it’s received a lot of excellent productions since it’s premiere in 2012 and has been lauded as the first “great” opera of the 21st century. Though, for the purposes of the club as primarily a group of Aussies watching and reviewing work it is rare, because I doubt we will see a production in Australia any time soon, if at all.

I found this piece to be exquisite. It was fascinating, tense and eerily beautiful throughout. The lightness of touch of orchestration is masterful. As Is Benjamin’s handling of the orchestra in the performance, and he’s also conducting it. The singing and acting, came together beautifully and I didn’t feel that one out-shone the other as I often feel in opera. The tension and intention of the performers was gripping throughout. The physical production was also amazing (I watched the world premiere performance at the Aix-en-Provence Festival, 2012). My one issue with the performance was that at times the direction of the performers could have been a little less safe. Sometimes it felt a little stand a deliver, and maybe the direction didn’t necessarily give the singers enough focus as to where to guide their intention, but overall it was really gripping.

What struct me most about the music was the easy of the vocal line, and the clarity of text. Now, the singers employed are excellent, but setting and writing opera in english is notoriously difficult. Comparing the work to Unsuk Chin’s Alice in Wonderland from a few weeks back, which had some really awkward and unreasonable text setting, this work was so easy to understand and seemed pretty singable. Where Chin would hold vowels for really long phrases, and have awkward settings of word stresses this piece avoided that so well. And most of the time, text wasn’t elongated, but was sung in a way that resembled speech without losing its operatic feel. A good example of how Benjamin does this is in this video from his next opera (above).

The libretto for the work, by playwright Martin Crimp, is also an excellent piece in itself. It struck me as subtle and full of shadow and light. An incredibly sophisticated structure emerged between the three central characters, and the drama that plays out was intoxicating.

I don’t want to give to much away about the plot, but in the penultimate scene we’re confronted with cannibalism. In writing this now sounds so melodramatic and stupid, but the way it’s written in the libretto it becomes this weird, sad and almost touching moment. That to me is the greatest master stroke in the work, it allows you to watch this grotesque moment and see beyond the taboo into a desperate and sad act of control. The exploration of taboo on stage is such a fascinating to me. This piece touches on not only cannibalism, but speaks to a dominant persons control of someone and if you read into the character of “Boy” which to me suggests he is an adolescent, the power of sexuality, lust and control, something I touched on in my own Orpheus. This work is an essay in tension, manipulation and desire, and I found it thrilling.

Two articles I found really useful in additional reading was this one from the New Yorker and old mate Alex Ross’ amazing blog.

Clive O'Connell review of Orpheus

I’ve long held Clive O’Connell in high esteem as a critic. Clive was the music critic for The Age for many years, and now run’s his own blog. The blog is an excellent read, I think because it allows Clive to write without the word limit that was needed for print publishing.

I was fortunate enough to be reviews by Clive beginning of last year, when he reviewed my work Orpheus. It is a review I hold very dear, not only as it’s positive but also as it shows he has a real love for the art form and has taken the time to try and understand what I was trying to do.

https://oconnellthemusic.com/

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This is the first time that the Midsumma Festival has offered me a review ticket in its 20 year history.   Admittedly, previous programs have given little room to serious music, the organizers being usually content to present bands and solo artists of limited ability or musicianship.   All the more remarkable, then, that this ambitious project got off the ground under the Festival’s umbrella, and that its character impressed both for its compressed clarity of content and for a happy avoidance of obtuseness.

Evan Lawson has composed a dance opera which pays an elliptically expressed duty to the myths surrounding Orpheus’ marriage to Eurydice and his relationship with fellow Argonaut, Calais who was one of the Boread twins.  To supplement a libretto of gnomic brevity, the work involves three dancers to propose a potent extra dimension to the story-line as sung by Raymond Khong (Orpheus), Kate Bright (Eurydice) and Joseph Ewart (Calais).   These roles’ respective dancers – Ashley Dougan, Piaera Lauritz, Luke Fryer  –  operated in a central area of the Oratory room, the audience positioned on three of its fringes while Lawson’s orchestral decet made a bulwark at the fourth.

The composer has found the constituents of his text in Calzabigi’s libretto for Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice, Striggio’s verses used by Monteverdi in L’Orfeo, and, for a coda,  the second sestet from Shakespeare’s song Orpheus with his lute made trees from that furiously neglected drama, Henry VIII.   Lawson also claims that as a prologue, he  made use of a Greek sea hymn by Phemocles, about whom I know nothing and could find out even less.  At an informational impasse, I thought that there might have been a confusion with Phanocles, who wrote about Orpheus’ paederastic relationship with Calais; or, more improbably, the playwright Philocles might have been involved.  Was it possible that Phemocles had some relation to the Orphic or Homeric Hymns?   We are left gasping for direction right from the start where the marine salutation is meant to occur but nothing rang any bells, even in the printed libretto.

Lawson’s singers seemed to be static but in fact moved around, singing in oratorio style from the front of the instrumental ensemble, or behind the band, eventually in the central arena.   His dancers made exits and entrances with similar flexibility.  As with so many of these multi-platform operations, I found it hard to focus, especially at the work’s opening where the sound-world proved attractive, even if it consisted in the main of sustained notes and chords, both teetering between post-Monteverdian chord progressions and not-too-astringent dissonance.   To be honest, the sounds won out over the dance action much of the time because the abstract nature of Dougan’s choreography seemed to move simply from attitude to attitude.   But then, I don’t know much that would weather informed scrutiny about the language of contemporary dance.

Still, the sonorities that emerged often proved extraordinary, in particular a passage highlighting Erica Tucceri’s bass flute later in the drama which impressed for its full-bodied power in this hall’s resonant acoustic.  Harpist Samantha Ramirez spent a fair amount of time bowing her strings, which is a device that didn’t seem that different in its results from the product of an orthodoxly addressed cello.  More successful were the various briefs allocated to Alexander Clayton’s percussion, his battery employed with determination and sometimes exemplary drama.

Of the singers, Kate Bright gave a splendid reading of the hero’s unfortunate wife, vitally powerful in the Part II duet and then mounting a bravura performance at Eurydice’s death which focused for a remarkably long period on the interval of a 2nd before the character was allowed to enter a more wide-ranging arioso, much of the scene unaccompanied.  Lawson set his bare-bones text with a wide-ranging compass for all three singers, but Bright alone managed her line’s top and bottom reaches with precision and thrilling vigour.

Khong’s tenor came across with similar force and a security that was questionable only at a few points where Lawson had used a note above the artist’s comfort zone, possibly negotiable with a switch to falsetto although that’s a dangerous ask in a vocal part that comes over as otherwise well-crafted and centrally positioned for the interpreter.  A similar moment hit for baritone Ewart, who enjoyed more courteous treatment and who produced a firm level of enunciation and clarity: a promising exhibition from the youngest member of this trio.

While the instrumental component of Orpheus tends to an alternation between portentous and sibilant, the vocal work is quite unpredictable: for whole stretches, as static as Glass; then suggestive of the placid leaps of Berio.  While you wouldn’t find it difficult to follow the emotional decline in Eurydice’s gasping, brittle death shudders or trace the fearful regret of Orpheus in Hell, it seemed to me that the score came into full flowering at ensemble moments, most obviously in the Shakespeare-utilizing epilogue where Lawson found a striking compositional vein that promised a sort of catharsis; in this tragedy, you find a consolation that broadens out into a generous efflorescence before the inevitable descent to darkness.

As I say, the dance impressed me most for its physicality more than for its expressive power.   Dougan was gifted with a remarkable solo at the work’s centre which I assume was intended to underline the struggles of Orpheus with his life after the final loss of his wife and his rejection of all women, climaxing in his confrontation with the Bacchae and their destruction of his body in a Maenad frenzy.  Lauritz’s pre-death solo gave the dancer a fine opportunity to demonstrate her unflappable solidity of gesture and positioning, and I found plenty to admire in the opening terzett where all three dancers interwove with considerable athleticism and not a trace of overt sexuality, a restraint also found in the final appearance where the dancers worked in unison as three discrete entities, all passion spent.

Orpheus is to be welcomed on several fronts.   Yes, it’s a new opera  –  and welcome for that  –  with a solid musicality behind it.   The production uses the talents of a fine group of professionals from within the Forest Collective organization and outside it; pretty much half and half in the instrumental desks.  It has a relevance to Midsumma through its re-examination of the Orpheus-Calais connection, taking matters some steps further by juxtaposing and interweaving it with the poet’s tragic marriage.   As well, Lawson and his forces handle the twin myths with dignity, taking key points and working with them rather than hammering the relationship triangle into flattened obviousness.  Best of all, the enterprise gives you a freshness of vision, even new insights into an old tale which both Monteverdi and Gluck felt obliged to end with a deus ex machina plot manipulation.  In this new telling, the central tragedie a trois remains intact.  You leave feeling that you have been involved in a ritual, human in its essence and recounted with a scouring freshness.

Rare opera club, vol. 3: Unsuk Chin's Alice in Wonderland

Well that’s the effect of living backwards, it makes everyone a little giddy at first. But there is one great advantage, the memory works both ways.

The White Queen in Through the Looking Glass

This piece has been on my watch list for a long time. I’ve watched snippets of the Munich State Opera premiere performance in the past, and so I was very excited to finally sit down with this piece.

My understanding of the piece, prior to seeing the full thing, was that it was a pretty wild ride, with a really fantastic production. Unfortunately, my expectations of a wild acid trip weren’t met.

Out of the two hour playing time, I certainly found some moments musically really fascinating but on the whole I felt that a lot of the material was either too long, too dull or too smart. I only laughed, and really it was a chuckle, once. I thought I would be giggling a lot more.

In doing some research of the piece I read this concise musical analysis, which brought to light some interesting musical techniques Unsuk used, such as palindromes, quotations, crab cannons and other musical riddles dotted through the score. Unfortunately, sometimes what looks cool on the page and which takes significant composition time to execute doesn’t transpose to something charming and witty aurally.

I also took issue with some of the text setting and the way it was sung. Opening this can of worms can provoke an unending debate between operatic and musical theatre traditions, but I feel many contemporary opera composers focus so much on the musical ideas and less on the text and the way the text is heard. Text is often an impetuous to composition, which I think is all well and good for concert work, but the moment we’re in the theatre there needs to be clear delivery of the text (away from the usual supertitles now common in opera, regardless of language) to the audience. The singing can sometimes inhibit this. The singers do an amazing job to execute what has been written, and can at times communicate the language to the audience very well. However, I don’t think this is achieved in a majority of sung moments in this work.

Being given such a big canvas as an opera, I feel that many composers want to pack in too many tricks and too many musical ideas. In this piece there seems to be some long or high singing that really blocks my understanding of the text. I actually thought that the spoken sections with orchestra accompaniment were some of the best sections of the piece. I guess it’s a question around why should this piece be sung in the first place, and what do we get out of the drama by a character singing. The Queen of Hearts, for instance, is given excellent over the top melodramatic music sung by a high Wagnerian soprano, though I didn’t understand a word she sang. But, this sort of worked for the character. But when Alice or the Cheshire Cat sang long, legato lines I felt a strong disconnect between the text, character and musical intention.

I also felt at times there was s disconnect from the music to my understanding of the characters and the setting. Alice’s long and legato aria toward the end lamenting what she’s seen and where reality and wonderland meet is stunningly beautiful and moving, but it just didn’t seem right to me and my reading of the book .

Second to this issue around directness of singing is acting. A work that I feel should be whimsical, dreamy and fun struck me as very hard and cold. There just didn’t seem to be a lot of joy on stage and I would be curious to see another production to see if that’s the cast, direction or anxiety from the difficult music.

Another thought, in Unsuk’s defence, is first operas are bloody hard to do, especially if you aren’t a singer. No matter how much vocal writing you do, trying to marry good quality vocal writing, with clear text setting and dramatic pacing is exceptionally difficult. I know that Alice has gone onto having a life as a concert piece, which maybe suits its musical objectives a bit more. But for me the dramatic pacing doesn’t work. I was also left guessing if this was a work for adults or children. I don’t think it had an interval, so 2 hours is a long sit for a child, especially when the music is so dense and the action on the stage so cold and slow.

Ultimately, it’s hard for me to be objective about Alice in Wonderland. There are few books I’ve read twice. Picture of Dorian Grey and Alice in Wonderland and Alice through the Looking-glass would have to be the works I’ve reread the most. I grew up on some amazing adaptations of this book, including of course the iconic Disney version, a really psychedelic UK version from 1972 with Peter Sellars, Dudley Moore and even Robert Helpman as the Mad-hatter, with a excellent John Barry (James Bond) score, the dreadful Tim Burton version, a Hello Kitty version and probably my personal favourite, a 1985 two part tele-movie adaptation with songs by Steve Allan. My personal highlight being Carol Channing as the White Queen singing about Jam.

Comparing these more commercial adaptations with an operatic version isn’t really fair. But ultimately for me this should be a psychedelic, fantastical trip intended for children and this version strikes me at times hyperactive, dull and nightmarish, unsure as to its purpose.

Alice and the characters and moments of the book often pop into all my work. My first symphony carries the subtitle In my garden with Alice and suggests a wild Wonderland-esq journey. At my Alice themed 21st birthday party my poor parents had to deal with each room of the house being turned into a different section of the book. She is an iconic symbol of fun and innocence, but all I got from this piece was clinical coldness and fear.

My backyard set up for my 21st Alice in Wonderland birthday party

Rare Opera Club, vol. 1 - Claude Vivier's Kopernikus

Since finding out about the music and life of Canadian composer Claude Vivier, I’ve been intrigued. A style that authentically melds East and South-East Asian influences with Spectralism and other French styles, plus a slight drop of camp, fantasy and lyricism. Vivier is also famous for his death, murdered by a truqueur (eng. trickster - young attractive man who turns tricks as a prostitute or accepts sexual advances to take money or harm) in Paris. This gothic, queer melodrama ending to his life speaks not only to my love to queer-ness in music, especially contemporary music, but also the long line of pain and suffering queer people have been exposed to over time. Alan Turing and Matthew Sheppard come to mind.

So, with all this in mind, for the first meeting of my new Rare Opera Club, I was really excited to explore Vivier’s opera Kopernikus. The idea with the club is to meet every week on Zoom, while stuck at. home in isolation during the Covid19 pandemic, and discuss a lesser performed work of the opera cannon.

This piece is a mystical walk through a myth laden, dream like world inhabited with Alice in Wonderland, the Queen of the Night, Mozart, Tristan & Isolde and Kopernikus who are all met by the Indian Fire God Angi traveling to the throbbing-stars. The libretto, by the composer is wild and multilayered and the music is for 7 singers and 7 instrument. They mimic each other, echo each other or work to accompany each other. The roles of each singer and instrument interweave in this fantastic texture. It’s primarily homophonic, that is solos music with accompanying material, and has the feeling of timeless stagnation where we are aurally focused on one single idea, very much like Messiaen. The next moment we receive a complexity of sounds, words (some real, some made up by Vivier) and textures. This meeting of stagnation and complexity, in a very effortless way, is a style and feeling I trying to implement in a lot of my own music and so speaks to me deeply. As does the slightly camp meeting of different mythological, real and historical characters. This patchwork of times and persons is very inspiring to me.

This sentence about his death, from his offical website speaks volumes. The last passage of music he wrote for this Tchiak opera, a character called Claude (so possibly himself) sings a line to do with plunging a knife into his heart for a lover, in a strange premonition of his own death.

In June 1982, with the help of a Canada Council grant, Vivier left Montreal for Paris, where he began work on an opera based on the death of Tchaikovsky. In March the following year he was stabbed to death by a young Parisian man who may have been a prospective lover and who was later caught and sentenced. His last work was the unfinished Glaubst du an die Unsterblichkeit der Seele, which contains a disturbing premonition of his untimely death. - http://www.claudevivier.com/

Images from documentary, featuring his friends and colleagues, including Gyorg Ligeti - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xfKna3MvvbU

Claude Vivier

Festival d’aix-en-provence

It’s official! Just booked my Qantas flights to Europe for March 23-April 4 where I’ll be working with Festival d'Aix-en-Provence in the development period of a new site specific opera! More info to come. If you’re around the south of France and London then, let me know. 😍 #newopera #newmusic #opera #composer #france #london #aixenprovence

Orpheus interview with CutCommon

“Orpheus is the great musician of antiquity”

EVAN LAWSON REIMAGINES THIS ANCIENT TALE

January 21, 2019 Articles

BY KIYA VAN DER LINDEN-KIAN

Separated from the love of his life Eurydice, Orpheus vows to descend into the underworld and win her back. But, just before they are both freed, he turns back to look – a move that sees his love lost forever…

From Berlioz’s Les Troyens to Scriabin’s Prometheus,ancient Greek myths – with their epic themes, tragic love stories, and comic routines – have inspired many settings in classical music.

Of all of these myths, few in the canon are as compelling as that of Orpheus. Both Monteverdi and Gluck wrote operas based on the musician hero, but now composer Evan Lawson has written his take on the classic myth – or, as he calls Orpheus, “the great musician of antiquity”.

Forest Collective composer Evan Lawson captured by Karin Locke.

Evan has been at the helm of the Forest Collective since its inception in 2009. He has been enticed by Greek mythology before, writing an opera on the story of Calypso and Odysseus in 2013. And now, he wants to retell the Orpheus myth and empower “the voices of characters generally disadvantaged” in the story. Evan’s Orpheus focuses on the lesser-known queer relationships in the myth, and tells some of the lesser-known details of the legendary tale.

With all things considered, this isn’t your average opera. In fact, it’s not even an opera! Orpheus is ballet-opera, which is built around danced and sung passages. The collaboration is undertaken with dancer Ashley Dougan.

Evan wants to flip the script on the story and let the audience see the events from another perspective. I had a chat with Evan about the direction of Orpheus, and what inspired him to write a ballet-opera in the first place.

Hi Evan, thanks for chatting with us. What compelled you to retell the Orpheus myth, and what do you think has inspired its many settings in music?

Orpheus is the great musician of antiquity. He was meant to have been the most beautiful lyre player and singer of the ancient Greek recitations, so that in itself lends itself easily to musical dramatisation. It’s also a damn good story, especially the section where he goes to the underworld. Not only does he survive this huge task, but the interaction with Eurydice is sad, beautiful, and poignant – the idea that he was so overcome with emotion, love, and anxiety that he did what he was told not to do, and turned around and lost her forever.

I wanted to retell this well-known myth because there is an unknown aspect of it in the relationship with Calais, an adolescent man who Orpheus had a pederasty relationship with. This sort of relationship is common to ancient Greek myth and culture in-general, where an older man has a mentor-type sexual relationship with an adolescent man. We often know these myths through Victorian versions that eliminate any same sex relationships.

Aside from that, most of my music focuses on ancient Greek myth and tradition, as I find it an ever-inspiring source of musical and social ideas, most of which are the building blocks of contemporary Western art and thought. 

LGBTQIA+ relationships and characters can often be found throughout Greek myth. What made you decide to focus on the relationship between Orpheus and Calais specifically?

It added an interesting complexity to the relationship with Eurydice. In the versions I could find, it was clear he loved Calais while on the Argo with him. In the opera, we open with Orpheus saving his life, and the other Argonauts, from the lure of the Sirens. Orpheus and Calais sing a love duet and enjoy their love for each other.

After this episode, in all the versions I found, there was nothing about how he met Eurydice or of what happened to Calais: he simply went on to marry Eurydice and then she died, which leads to the famous cave sequence. I decided to use this lack of information to focus more on the pawns of the story, Calais and Eurydice, and show how the story is always geared toward the hero, leaving these often distraught characters in their wake.

So, the Orpheus and Calais relationship is given focus, but so is Eurydice as a strong woman, made to suffer and die for the sake of a male hero.

This is your second opera, and your first was about Calypso and Odysseus. What draws you to telling the stories of ancient Greek myth and can we expect to see any overlap between the two works?

In Calypso and Odysseus, it was a very similar situation; Calypso is almost an afterthought in the Odyssey. She’s hardly given one page, but Odysseus stays on her island for something like seven years! And she’s portrayed as the scheming, lustful woman, so I wanted to right that wrong. The man had a wife and kids back home, but it was okay for him to stay in her kingdom and for him to be taken advantage of…

I understand the libretto is a combination of Monteverdi and Gluck’s libretti of their respective Orpheus operas. What were some of the challenges in putting these two stylistically different artists together?

It was from a desire to take the voices of characters generally disadvantaged in opera historically (women, mainly, but also in this instance the ‘gay’ man Calais), and take those words and try to empower these characters, rather than disadvantage them as they generally are in the older works.

I’m very aware of being a white man who is creating female characters and making them go through horrific things. In this version, Eurydice’s death and the journey of her soul from body to Hades is depicted quite graphically. This is the norm in opera – with men making female characters go through pain – and I wanted to try and empower the female character and performer to show a more genuine and human side, less dependent on the actions of a heroic man; and, also, just to acknowledge the fact that I am a man asking a female performer to portray this.

The libretto also contains words from Phemocles, a lesser-known Greek writer of prose and poetry, and a section from a Shakespeare sonnet. 

How did you decide to make the work a ballet opera? What draws you to the format?

Opera isn’t a new form for me: I’ve already had one performed, and used to write many while I was in high school. Dance is a form that I love, but had never worked in. So once the opportunity arose to work with the amazing Ashley Dougan, I thought of the Orpheus project.

My initial conception of the work was for it to be a cross-genre symphony-opera, so it seemed logical to take another genre-bending step and include dance into that, too. 

The form, ballet-opera, is one that seems new to us now, and is common with many contemporary composers. However, in the works of Gluck, Lully, and the operas of the French empire, dance was a very common aspect to an operatic production, so there is a canon to draw on.

What are some of the key messages of the Orpheus myth that audiences will take away for your work?

I hope the audience will take away an ease in seeing two men declare their love to each other through song. But also, within an opera context, be confronted by the true pain of a woman and how we allow these characters – crafted by men but portrayed by women – to live on stage. 

Ashley Dougan captured by Meghan Scerri.

See the Forest Collective present Orpheus as part of Midsumma Festival and Convent Live, January 31-February 3. The work is supported by Creative Victoria and City of Yarra and is a co-commission between Forest Collective and Prismatx Ensemble.