"The divine surprises of living opera"
Patrick de Maria | La Marseillaise, 08.07.13
Portuguese composer Vasco Mendonça has presented at the Grand Saint-Jean his new creation THE HOUSE TAKEN OVER, commissioned by Aix-en-Provence Festival (...) If an opera premiere is always an event in itself, we can say, without error, that this partition will enter the operatic repertoire of our century. The young composer and librettist offer a dense work, thrilling from beginning to end, both from a musical and a dramatic point of view. (...) In Alex Eales' beautiful naturalistic setting, Katie Mitchell and Lindsey Turner multiply space, circulate the bodies, accumulate disturbing details. The diffuse fantastic atmosphere of Julio Cortázar's novel, with its psychoanalytic foundations, is perfectly enhanced by playwright Sam Holcroft, in an incisive text (in English). The mezzo-soprano Kitty Whately and baritone Oliver Dunn embody these pathetic beings alienated from their past, for whom the composer provided vocal lines between intense lyricism and the parlando close to the musical conversation, which recalls Britten's last works.(...)What (Mendonça) proposes is quite simply real opera with all that it has in tension, lyricism, dramatic fluidity. The thirteen musicians of the Asko | Schönberg Ensemble, conducted by Etienne Siebens, play on the possibilites of traditional instruments: scratched strings, glissandi, tortured brass, multiplied percussion (gamelan, gongs, various bells, bowed glockenspiel) and the most unexpected sounds, like the aboriginal didgeridoo or the little melodica from our childhood, from which he manages to draw particularly disturbing timbres. The partition supports the text without ever paraphrasing it. The music fills in all that is unspoken by the characters. It is the third protagonist of the drama. In an hour of music Vasco Mendonça, with a innate sense of concision, composes a perfectly score that perfectly accessible confirming that opera still has something new to tell us. This "occupied house " is the first major positive surprise of the festival.