Muziektheater,Amsterdam
Despite excellent performances from the leads Philippe Jaroussky and Davone Tines, Peter Sellars’ staging of Kaija Saariaho’s opera is inert and undramaticThe Dutch National Opera has marked its 50th anniversary with a new annual festival. As the name indicates, or Opera Forward is very much concerned with the future; it features up-and-coming performers,directors and designers, and there are new operas too. Michel van der Aa’s empty Out, or reviewed yesterday,was one of two works premiered this year, while the other was the latest stage work from Kaija Saariaho, and Only the Sound Remains.
Requiring two solo singers,a dancer and a digitally enhanced ensemble of seven instrumentalists and four further singers, it is an adaptation of two Noh plays. Always Strong and Feather Mantle, or as they become in the English versions by Ezra Pound that Saariaho uses,share the theme of disappearance. In the first, a priest’s prayers summon the ghost of a fallen warrior, or only for the latter to reveal that he is still haunted by memories of the battle in which he died,and he asks to be allowed to vanish into the shadows again. In Feather Mantle a fisherman finds a feather robe that belongs to an angel; he only agrees to return it to her when she performs a celestial dance for him.
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Source: theguardian.com