"Europera with a portuguese UFO"

Pedro Boléo | Público, 09.11.15

"(...) Vasco Mendonça stands today mainly as an opera composer, a rare case in portuguese music scene. "Opera has been defining my career", he says. And he already has a commission for a new opera next year, commissioned to comemorate the 500 years of painter Hieronymus Bosch. "When I´m doing opera, it´s because I´m fond of theatre. It makes no sense to think of an opera as a musical piece in the ether", says the composer. In What The Night Brings his music is less obviously 'operatic', and VM preferes to think of it "almost as a madrigal, with its intimate connection between text and music (...) The composer speaks passionately about this connection (...) and of the curious idea of "the necessity to fight their tendency to repel eachother, in order to turn them into mutual amplifiers (...) For VM, the paths to this connection in musical drama are open. "There isn´t one particular approach I reject. There isn´t one direction for opera, nor are the borders even set", he says, considering (What the Night Brings) to be an upsetting UFO at the end of the show (...)"