I'm in Bolzano directing the first revival since its premiere in 2003 of an opera called Alex Brücke Langer by an Italian composer called Giovanni Verrando.Teatro Comunale Website I am very in sympathy with the musical style of the piece as it reminds me of Berio and Steve Reich, both of whose work have been very important to me as a performer. It combines Berios'sense of the voice as an instrument with Reich's ability to create vertical harmonic texture and astounding beauty through using voices as an ensemble. All this makes the passages where voices are used as solo characters all the more poignant and effective. It is a four-hander with the singers and the small instrumental ensemble mic'd – again familiar territory for me. Giovanni's Website
The Teatro Communale in Bolzano
The piece is about a local politician, Alex Langer, who led the Green Party in Europe during the mid 1990's and championed the cause for cultural and political unity in this part of the world. However, wearied by others' intransigence and federal burocracy, he took his own life in 1996.
It is a piece close to my heart dramatically as well as musically as it is very much a 'real' story and the composer and librettist have not tried to tie up the loose ends or present conclusions. I've been convinced of the possibilities of opera which is not narrative led but almost 'docu-opera' since performing Steve Reich's Three Tales – a work which similarly presented real events in an innovative musical way. A standard opera or piece of theatre invokes in its audience, in part, the need for conclusion – message – character development, all of which may not be true to real human experience but are natural for us to seek. Meanwhile a documentary is bound by biographical and historical fact. How great to combine the two – an opera with documentarial content but which utilises the unique emotional pull of the sung human voice and the dramatic possibilities of theatre without being bound by any known structure.
The view from my rehearsal room - not bad eh!
I explored this idea in the piece I work-shopped with composer Ben Park at Opera North, 88 minutes. My libretto took facts and real stories of suicide for its source material and tried to present them in a way which didn't attempt to rationalise the issue but instead provoke honest debate – something missing with this subject. For many reasons I only got part way towards succeeding, not least of which was the difficulty of the subject. However, being involved in this revival of Alex Brücke Langer has reminded me how exciting I find this particular kind of work.
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