Katowice Culture Nature / A Ballad of a Miserable World / Klangforum Wien & Needcompany / Amopera - NOSPR

‘Amopera is a catastrophe, a contemporary battle, a dystopic ballad, a passionate dialogue, a healing process, an ode to the voice, to opera, to humanity,’ says Jan Lauwers, founder of the legendary artistic house Needcompany. Amopera, a joint undertaking by the Belgian theatre ensemble and Klangforum Wien, is a meta-opera that juxtaposes selected excerpts from works created over the past one hundred years, thus forming a new kind of genre that reaches beyond the boundaries of the traditional theatrical spectacle.

The title, though somewhat enigmatic, underscores two key ideas guiding the creators. To begin with, Amopera fuses ‘amor’ and ‘opera’, acknowledging love as the defining subject of opera as a genre. This meta-opera ventures into chilling tales of love, betrayal, and desire, drawing on fragments from The Rape of Lucretia by Benjamin Britten, and recalling the dark legend of Carlo Gesualdo of Venosa, which lies behind Luci mie traditrici (My Traitorous Eyes) by Salvatore Sciarrino. The second idea embedded in the title is the philosophical declaration: ‘I am opera’. The narrative of Amopera reaches beyond operatic characters themselves. It is no longer only Cassandra from Iannis Xenakis’ work, or Lulu from Alban Berg’s opera, but the performers themselves: the singers Holger Falk and Sarah Maria Sun, along with the musicians of Klangforum Wien. Another striking feature here is the postmodern spirit of playful dialogue with the history of opera that permeates both the fragment from I Hate Mozart by Bernhard Lang and Recital I by Luciano Berio, filled with dozens of quotations ranging from Claudio Monteverdi and Johann Sebastian Bach, through Giuseppe Verdi, to Gustav Mahler and Igor Stravinsky.

Thus, a unique space is created where operatic archetypes confront everyday life, and where the story becomes inextricably interwoven with those who are telling it.

Szymon Maliszewski

Concert duration: approximately 90 minutes

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Kindly supported by Tiroler Festspiele Erl, Haselsteiner Familien-Privatstiftung.
Partner: Universal Edition
Klangforum Wien performs courtesy of its Principal Sponsor, Erste Bank.