WAGNER & HEAVY METAL
  • Home
    • Donnerwetter!
    • From Metal to Wagner
    • From Rush to Lohengrin
    • Franz Liszt - The First Rock Star
    • The Wagner - Strauss connection
    • The day of Wagner & Heavy Metal
    • Classical picks
  • Latest
    • Ein Holländer in Bayreuth 2014
    • Ein Holländer in Bayreuth 2017 - Meistersinger
    • Ein Holländer in Bayreuth 2017 - Der Ring
    • Ein Holländer in Bayreuth - Parsifal 2018
    • Ein Holländer in Bayreuth - Parsifal 2023
    • Ein Holländer in Bayreuth - Tannhäuser 2023
  • One Ring to rule them all
    • Wagner & Tolkien: Ring to Ring
    • Die Nibelungen (Fritz Lang 1924)
  • Metal Section
  • Nederlands
    • De kluis (recensies)
    • Trip naar Bayreuth (2014)
    • De tovenaar van Bayreuth (2014)
    • Bayreuther Meistersinger (2017)
    • Bayreuther Ring (2017)
    • Parsifal in Bayreuth (2018)
  • Contact

Voices unheard: Cassandra in Brussels

9/14/2023

0 Comments

 
La Monnaie in Brussels opens the new season with a world premiere. In their first opera, Belgian composer Bernard Foccroulle and librettist Matthew Jocelyn touch on a very topical theme: environmental activism and social inertia. About voices that are not heard.
Picture
©Karl Foster
The weather was more than appropriate. With 30 degrees in September (we are in the hottest summer ever recorded worldwide), Le Monnaie in Brussels hosted the world premiere of Cassandra, an opera with climate change as its theme. Divided into thirteen scenes, it alternates the story of the Trojan princess Cassandra, whose predictions about the fall of Troy were not taken seriously, with the disbelief that climate scientist Sandra Seymour encounters when she shares her knowledge about the melting of ice caps at the South Pole. In the layers of ice, Sandra sees the past, a past of a warming Earth. With its melting, that view of the past disappears. A past that warns us of the future.

The Belgian composer Bernard Foccroulle, also an organist who has previously recorded all of Bach's and Buxtehude's organ works, and until recently was known primarily as a composer of mainly instrumental music, is creating his first opera with Cassandra. An opera with activitism as its theme, which should not be called an activist opera. The opera is a story about voices that are not heard, not believed, with disastrous consequences. Mythology and the present reach out to each other in a musical drama in which Cassandra and Sandra are equals who see each other's story mirrored and amplified across the boundaries of time.
Picture
©Karl Foster
With the lamentation of a chorus, which like a Greek choir comments and otherwise not interfere with the action, the story opens. We look onstage at a kind of glacial formation that will also serve as a library, the ancient city of Troy and a beehive. Cassandra stands in the center of the stage in front of a ruin that collapses. Troy is going down, and Cassandra is watching in horror.
 
From the then, of Aeschylos and his play "Agamemnon," we then jump to the present in which climatologist Sandra Seymour performs a one-woman show at the conclusion of a conference on climate change. Blake, a student of ancient Greek language and culture, and a member of a Climate Action group, is annoyed by the light-hearted tone with which Sandra addresses climate issues. Needless to say, love will blossom between Blake and Sandra.
 
In the third scene, we encounter a second, more grim love story. The meeting between Cassandra and the god Apollo. We see Cassandra and Apollo engaged in a fierce dialogue. Apollo gave Cassandra the gift of prophecy in exchange for sex. But Cassandra refuses the reciprocation upon which Apollo spits in her mouth. No one will believe the words that come out of that anymore.
Picture
©Karl Foster
These three scenes form the foundation on which librettist Matthew Jocelyn builds in later scenes. These include meetings between Sandra and Blake, a dinner with Sandra's family, a meeting between Cassandra and her father King Priam, who is still struggling with the question of why Troy was destroyed, and a poignant scene in which Naomi, Sandra's younger sister, joyfully looks forward to the birth of her daughter. An event that casts doubt on Sandra about the responsibility of having a child, given the ecological developments.
 
Blake does want a child. A bed scene highlighting the differences between Sandra and Blake on the matter of having children is interspersed with discussions about climate and whether scientific research should be accompanied by climate action. Blake chooses climate action and leaves for the South Pole.

In the penultimate, eleventh scene, we once again see Sandra in her one-woman show where she delivers her message. It is her farewell performance, as she has decided to follow Blake in his activism to seize oil tankers. The show is interrupted by someone in the balcony exclaiming, "I came here for stand-up comedy, not an eco-terrorist tirade." During the show, she is told that Blake's ship sank, it is unclear how, perhaps by a torpedo, and that he most likely drowned. Blake's death feels a bit forced - we're in the opera so a protagonist must die. Something like that.
Picture
©Karl Foster
In the final scene, Sandra awakens, as if from a traumatic fever dream, and believes she is meeting Cassandra. In a dialogue in which both Cassandra and Sandra long for redemption from their shared misery, Sandra sings that she will not let anyone take away her voice. The identification with her mythological predecessor is complete. With the man on the balcony still in mind, the current state of the public debate and the current times of information inflation, we think of the role of social media that, like a modern many-headed Apollo, spits into the mouths of people, and Sandra here in particular. The duet between Cassandra and Sandra, its introspection, its looking forward to an uncertain future, may count as the opera's highlight. With twelve scenes in two hours and a story in which dramatic progression is at times pending, the opera is an intense sit. As thought-provoking interludes, there are three moments where we see the world-wide bee population dwindling. As the lights on stage slowly dim, only three more bees buzz the opera to its end.
Picture
©Karl Foster
Foccroulle envelops his story of the tragedy of voices not heard and warnings not believed with music that both sears and pleases, a music that both intoxicates and sharpens the senses. It is music that refers to that other organist who composed, Olivier Messiaen, and is reminiscent of one of Messiaen's pupils, George Benjamin. But whereas in Benjamin's operas the vocal lines are a natural excerpt from the music over which they meander, Foccroulle's vocal parts sound somewhat mechanical. They often linger in what I shall call melodic declamation, as if the drama behind the words needs to be forcibly sung. In the instrumentation, Foccroulle endows Sandra with a marimba and Blake with a saxophone. A helping hand in following the vocal lines in the dialogues that are sometimes a bit too verbose. Conductor Kazushi Ono, with La Monnaiet's symphony orchestra, pulls the musical arcs of tension considerably taut.

Soprano Sarah Defrise excelled as Naomi, Sandra's sister, especially in the lullaby she sang for her unborn child, a lyrical highlight. Jessica Niles gave a spirited interpretation of the character of Sandra Seymour with her firm, clear soprano, and Katarina Bradić, as Cassandra, embodied a woman who is by turns inspired, deficient and desperate.
Picture
©Karl Foster
All in all, Cassandra, the opera, succeeds in impregnating topical issues into art. Its music, along with the themes it addresses, resonates as you walk past the European Parliament in Brussels where huge posters bear witness to the most current concerns: the Russian invasion of Ukraine and a desired climate neutrality by 2050. A goal that, for all its good intentions notwithstanding, with the question marks you can place on politics that are not or not sufficiently able to cope with crises, are probably not going to be met. And 2050 is already too late. We hear the unheard voices and the sound of melting ice converge in a roaring silence.
Cassandra, La Monnaie, Brussels, 10 September 2023 (world premiere)
CASSANDRA / TICKETS
Music - Bernard Foccroulle
Libretto - Matthew Jocelyn
 
Kazushi Ono - Conductor
 
DIRECTION
Marie-Ève Signeyrole - Director, Video Artist
Fabien Teigné - Set Designer
Yashi - Costume Designer
Louis Geisler - Dramaturgy
 
CAST
Katarina Bradić - Cassandra
Jessica Niles - Sandra
Susan Bickley – Hecuba, Victoria
Sarah Defrise - Naomi
Paul Appleby - Blake
Joshua Hopkins - Apollo
Gidon Saks ­ Priam, Alexander
Sandrine Mairesse - Stage Manager
Lisa Willems - Conference Presenter

- Wouter de Moor
0 Comments



Leave a Reply.

    RSS Feed

    WOZZECK
    FRAU OHNE SCHATTEN
    IDOMENEO CAUGHT IN A WEB
    SALOME: THE POETRY OF HORROR
    DIE ERSTEN MENSCHEN
    NOSFERATU
    ART AND WAR
    BLOOD INCANTATION: BEYOND SPACE AND SOUND
    IPHIGÉNIE IN MARIUPOL
    Bruckner's Bicentenary
    MAHLER ON PERIOD INSTRUMENTS
    DER FLIEGENDE HOLLANDER
    DIABOLUS IN MUSICA
    THE RHINE GOTHIC
    WAGNER & H.P. LOVECRAFT
    Wagner & Comic Books
    DIE WALKURE ON PERIOD INSTRUMENTS
    GOING TO LEGOLAND
    LIVING COLOUR
    SIEGFRIED IN A GLORIOUS WALL OF SOUND
    LOHENGRIN IN THE FACTORY
    CASSANDRA: Voices unheard
    The merciless Tito of Milo Rau
     Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny
    Bayreuth 2023
    THE STEAMPUNK RING
    The Day of the Dead
    Mahler and the Resurrection
    TIME
    KÖNIGSKINDER: A TRIUMPH IN TRISTESSE
    An EVENING WITH DER FREISCHUTZ
    DAS RHEINGOLD ON PERIOD INSTRUMENTS
    UPLOAD (LIVING IN A DATA STREAM)
    DER SILBERSEE
    A (POST) COVID PARSIFAL
    THE WRITE OF SPRING
    A DescenT Into The Nibelheim Of The Mind
    Eddie van Halen
    Wagner at the movies
    Mahler's 9th and the endless night
    With Mahler and Stravinsky into the new year
    The return of Die Walküre
    Pagliacci / Cavalleria Rusticana
    (No) Bayreuth (Summer blog)
    Tannhäuser: what's on a man's mind
    About extreme music
    Die Tote Stadt
    Helmut Lachenmann in the Mozart sandwich
    Oedipe: is man stronger than fate?
    One More ... (Ring cycle)
    Marnie: opera & pictures
    The Halloween Top 10
    Jenufa: ice-cold reality & warm-blooded music
    ​My Parsifal Conductor: a Wagnerian Comedy
    Lohengrin: in the Empire of the Swan
    Die Zauberflöte in a roller coaster
    Ein Holländer in Bayreuth: Parsifal
    Heavy Summer (the road to Parsifal)
    Lohengrin in screenshots
    Lessons in Love and Violence
    Berlin/Blog: Faust & the claws of time
    The Gambler: Russian roulette with Prokofiev
    BACH/BLOG: BachFest Leipzig
    Der Fliegende Holländer, Wagner & Dracula
    The Christina cycle of Klas Torstensson
    La Clemenza di Tito: Mozart über alles
    Bruckner and the organ
    Gurre-Lieder: the second coming
    Parsifal in Flanders: Reign in Blood
    Tristan & Isolde and the impossible embrace
    Danielle Gatti & Bruckner's 9th
    On the birthday of Ludwig (Beethoven's  mighty 9)
    The dinner party from hell
    Zemlinsky & Puccini: A Florentine diptych
    La clemenza di Tito (Veni, Vidi, vici)
    Eliogabalo (here comes the Sun King)
    La Forza del Destino
    Das Wunder Der Heliane
    'Ein Wunder' to look forward to
    Ein Holländer in Bayreuth
    Franz Liszt in Bayreuth
    Salome & The Walking Dead
    Lohengrin in Holland
    Wagner Weekend
    The Summer Of 2016
    ORFEO (Richard Powers)
    Parsifal in Screenshots (Bayreuth 2016)
    Being Tchaikovsky
    Gustavo & Gustav: Dudamel & Mahler
    Haitink & Bruckner: a never-ending story
    Henry Rollins (spoken word)
    David Bowie
    For Lemmy and Boulez
    Boulez ist ToT
    Lemmy -  Rock In Peace
    The Battle: who's the better Lohengrin?
    Stockhausen and Heavy Metal
    Franz Liszt in the funny papers
    Tristan und Isolde
    Der Rosenkavalier
    Solti's Ring and Bayreuth in 1976
    Easter Chant (Via Crucis)
    Boulez turns 90
    Holy Tinnitus
    Franz Liszt in the Phot-O-Matic
    The Holy Grail
    Franz Liszt - Rock Star avant la lettre
    The best theater experience in my life
    Boulez in Holland

    TIMELINE

    June 2025
    May 2025
    February 2025
    January 2025
    December 2024
    November 2024
    October 2024
    September 2024
    August 2024
    July 2024
    June 2024
    April 2024
    March 2024
    December 2023
    November 2023
    September 2023
    August 2023
    July 2023
    May 2023
    October 2022
    June 2022
    November 2021
    October 2021
    September 2021
    March 2021
    October 2020
    February 2020
    January 2020
    November 2019
    September 2019
    July 2019
    April 2019
    March 2019
    February 2019
    January 2019
    December 2018
    November 2018
    October 2018
    September 2018
    August 2018
    July 2018
    June 2018
    May 2018
    March 2018
    January 2018
    December 2017
    November 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    August 2017
    June 2017
    April 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    August 2016
    July 2016
    June 2016
    March 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016
    December 2015
    October 2015
    September 2015
    August 2015
    April 2015
    March 2015
    February 2015
    November 2014
    January 2011

Picture
Wagner-HeavyMetal.com
  • Home
    • Donnerwetter!
    • From Metal to Wagner
    • From Rush to Lohengrin
    • Franz Liszt - The First Rock Star
    • The Wagner - Strauss connection
    • The day of Wagner & Heavy Metal
    • Classical picks
  • Latest
    • Ein Holländer in Bayreuth 2014
    • Ein Holländer in Bayreuth 2017 - Meistersinger
    • Ein Holländer in Bayreuth 2017 - Der Ring
    • Ein Holländer in Bayreuth - Parsifal 2018
    • Ein Holländer in Bayreuth - Parsifal 2023
    • Ein Holländer in Bayreuth - Tannhäuser 2023
  • One Ring to rule them all
    • Wagner & Tolkien: Ring to Ring
    • Die Nibelungen (Fritz Lang 1924)
  • Metal Section
  • Nederlands
    • De kluis (recensies)
    • Trip naar Bayreuth (2014)
    • De tovenaar van Bayreuth (2014)
    • Bayreuther Meistersinger (2017)
    • Bayreuther Ring (2017)
    • Parsifal in Bayreuth (2018)
  • Contact