BLANK OUT
Finnish National Opera’s
Alminsali stage has now to offer a little bit different opera experience:
Michel van der Aa’s Blank Out, that had its first night in Amsterdam almost a year
ago. The only live performer of the opera is the soprano, Katherine Manley,
rest of the opera is recorded. The solution is interesting and allows adding
different, both sound-related and visual elements. Such solutions would have
been hard to use in a traditional opera production. The decision to use also
3D-technology (the audience wore 3D-glasses during the whole performance) was
without doubt modern, though except in a few places, I could not quite grasp
what the glasses were for.
Building of the storyline
was fascinating. You should not get scared by the list of words in the
beginning, because the story is like a knit; from fragments of yarn a beautiful
two-sided knit is made by the end of the opera. In the end the story enchants
you and makes you ponder upon memories, life and traumas.
From the point of view
of the music it is clear that this is not like the old classic operas. But that
should not stop anybody to go and see it, since even though I am a huge fan of
the old masters, I can based on my own experience recommend this opera to
everybody. At least I decided that if the opportunity rises, I will go and see
more works of Michel van der Aa. Sure, the opera is unusual and one of the
reasons to that is that it uses electronic music. During the pre-performance
talk Michel van der Aa said that some people have asked him if this even an
opera. However, there is so much melodic music in this work in addition to the
electronic music, that it definitely can be classified as an opera. And in case
somebody doesn’t like it, the length is only 70 minutes, so you can live
through it.
Before the performance
on Saturday night there was a pre-performance talk where the artistic director
of Musica Nova Helsinki André de Ridder interviewed the composer. Though,
calling it an interview may be a bit too much to say, since his interviewing
technique was a bit peculiar. He asked, answered his own question and then
somehow tried to give a chance to the composer to say something by asking him
to describe the answer more. It seemed at least to me that Michel van der Aa
sometimes had difficulties to figure out something fresh to say. I really would
have enjoyed hearing more of his ideas.
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| Pre-performance talk, composer on the right |
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| Programme, copyright Finnish National Opera |
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