Sábado
Myriam Gaspar | Sábado, 22.12.15
He could have been a jazz musician. Even played at the Hot Club of Portugal, but the fascination by composition swept him away. Studied with George Benjamin at King´s College London, was composer-in-residence at Casa da Música in Porto, and the Gulbenkian Foundation commissioned him a piece to celebrate Gulbenkian Orchestra´s 50th anniversary. His works have been performed in major european venues, by groups such as the Asko | Schoenberg Ensemble. In 2013, premiered The House Taken Over at Aix-en-Provence Festival, and is now composing a new opera for the 500th anniversary of Hieronymus Bosch, in Holland.
How did you know you had been chosen by the Rolex Foundation for the Mentor and Protégé program?
I received a rather informal email, wrapped in a certain secrecy. At first, I even thought it was spam. It said I´d been selected to apply for the Rolex Mentor and Protégé award - which I hadn´t heard of. Sent me a password to do the application, which is quite complex. I had to record myself on video, submit my portfolio, write a personal letter.
The international jury is formed by five people, and each member proposes five candidates.
Yes. And out of those 25 candidates, they then selected three finalists. I was told I was supposed to meet with the other finalists and Kaija Saariaho in Lyon, where she was having a performance.
Do you know who proposed you?
It was a secret at that point. We were only told later on, at a meeting in Geneva. They´re quite careful with that sort of thing, to avoid lobbying. In my case, it was the swiss composer Michael Jarrell, whom I´d met in France a few years before.
How did you feel when you knew you were in the last three?
It was surprising. It´s nice to be in the final three candidates, in a pool of composers younger than 40, with no geographical restricitions.
You thought: I´m really good...
(laughs) I´m extremely self-critical, the challenge is to ease the self-criticism. For example, when I finish a piece I´m usually less happy with it than when I hear it two years after. There´s a feeling of fragility.
Do you feel insecure?
Since there is a very intimate connection between what I am and what I do, to some degree there´s always a sense of insecurity when you expose yourself. In a way, it is as if you´re jumping on stage, exposing yourself and asking: now judge me. But generally, when I hand in a piece, I´m happy with what I´ve done - otherwise I´ll postpone or cancel it.
Has that happened already?
Yes. Once, just three weeks before a deadline, after struggling for a while, I called the commissioner and told him: I´m not able to do this right now.
How long does it take you to finish a piece?
It varies a lot. It depends on the lenght, if it´s chamber music or an orchestral piece... For example, I´m now starting a new chamber opera for three singers and fourteen musicians, about 1h20 long. It should take me a year to finish it. I´m slow - it can take me up to four hours to be certain of a single note.
Where does inspiration come from?
Stravinsky used to say: "I´m in my desk from nine till five. If inspiration comes, she´ll know where to find me." It´s not so much about having ideas. There are always plenty, what is necessary is to filter them. I sometimes say I have a somewhat abnormal curiosity on what surrounds me, I´m always hyper alert to everything. I may have an idea when I drop off my son at school, and I notice the polyrhythm by a couple of intermittent traffic lights nearby, or have an idea from a poem - for example, the title of orchestral piece I´ve written for Gulbenkian is a wordplay with a passage from Eliot´s The Hollow Men.
Thanks to Rolex, Kaija Saariaho was your mentor for a year. What did you talk about in your first meeting?
About everything but music. Kaija is someone easy to connect to, and I felt very comfortable with her. At the time, much more than music or my career, the main focus in my life had been the birth of my first child, which had operated a disturbing change in me. I was experiencing a sense of fragility related to his existence, which I had never experienced before. I´m usually quite a reckless person.
Why are there more male composers than female ones?
Because the classical music business is very chauvinistic. Luckily, the tendency is reversing. There´s absolutely no gift that men have and women don´t.
What´s your daily routine like? Are you methodical?
Yes. "Workaholic", as my wife says. If I´m allowed, I´ll work every day. It´s what defines me. It is as if I´m in a self-contained dimension.
(...)
Why did you feel the need to move to Holland?
The most important thing for a composer is to listen, to make, to react. Trial, error, trial, error. I needed that, and it wasn´t possible at the time in Portugal. During the two years I was in Holland doing my masters' degree, there were over thirty performances of my music - which is astounding. I also had the chance to work with professional ensembles, had pieces performed at the Concertgebouw... Holland was a sort of El Dorado to learn and develop as a composer.
(...)
As a composer, are you not affected by portuguese reality?
I want to. For example, the discussions we´re having about my next opera (which will premiere in Brugges in September 2016, integrated in the comemorations of Hieronymous Bosch´s 500th anniversary) are mainly on moral ambiguity. It´s a terrible, but unsolvable, problem. At this point, Europe´s burning. Those pictures of the refugee boats arriving at the same beaches the tourists are getting a tan... Are we guilty? People left to their own misery, running away. It´s the banality of evil described by Arendt and Eliot: the world doesn´t end with a bang, but with a whimper. In that sense, opera is interesting because it allows for these issues to be addressed.
(...)
Aix Festival
Elise Ortega | Aix-en-Provence Festival, 13.09.13
EO How did you discover Julio Cortazar’s short story?
VM I was living in Amsterdam at the time - this was ten years ago - and a friend had sent it to me in its original Spanish version. When I first read it I thought: "This makes no sense" and I assumed it had to do with me not being fluent in Spanish. But I had actually understood it - the strangeness was all in the text. And it has stayed with me ever since, but just as a text I was very fond of.
EO What moved you in his short story?
VM The most striking element of this story is of course the syblings' reaction to the invasion. The fact that they don´t leave means they find this situation - sharing their house with an unknown entity - preferable to an escape. And this means they´re either not afraid of the invader(s) or that there´s something far worse outside. Both hypotesis are quite interesting and unsettling: if they´re not afraid then perhaps the whole thing is nothing but a terrible dream or a dellusion, and we thus find ourselves silently witnessing a self-destructive, pathological shared behaviour; on the other hand, if there is indeed a presence in the house and they´re too afraid of what´s outside to leave, what on earth could it possibly be?
EO What is your interpretation of the short story?
VM Although there can be a political interpretation to it, I feel more drawn to a phsycological reading. This story certainly taps into issues I´m very interested in: the complexities of intimate relationships, alienation, and more importantly, the way fear - in all its degrees - can shift from a defense mechanism into a paralysing disability.
EO Do you think the protagonists are stuck in the past?
VM I think they are certainly trapped in their own lives, suffering from the 'boiling frog syndrome', which is a rather silly aneccdote I quite like: the premise is that if a frog is placed in boiling water, it will jump out, but if it is placed in cold water that is slowly heated, it will not perceive the danger and will be cooked to death. This process of losing touch of the water´s temperature, of how self-destructive our behaviours can become, is something that truly fascinates me.
EO Do you have this feeling with your own life? Not being aware?
VM I think most people have, to a certain extent and at a certain point in their lives, experienced the feeling of being trapped in a certain situation - I certainly have. This unrestlessness, which can ultimately trigger very positive changes in your life, can sometimes degenerate in terrible spirals of bitterness and alienation, which are as disabilitating as a physical disease.
EO What made you want to compose this opera?
VM I was going over different texts to present, and this one struck me for its theatrical potential. The plot is very simple and mysterious: two people trapped in a house by themselves. This gives a lot of room to play around. I think reduction, austerity stimulate creativity. And there's a lot of that in Cortázar's short story.
EO What inspires you outside of the music field?
VM I am very fond of Samuel Beckett´s and Harold Pinter’s plays. The innate violence and despair contained in human relationships is, I think, is at the core of their work. Although Beckett´s settings are usually post-apocalyptic no man´s lands, so I guess Pinter´s domesticity would have a more direct link to this piece. I´ve always been impressed by his pairing of violence and intimacy, and by the way he manages to create an atmosphere of terrible menace through apparently banal dialogue.
EO How did the project started?
VM There were different stages in the project: I started thinking about this as a sketch and presented it two years ago and then it sort of stayed there. The actual composition of the piece was very fast. I got Sam’s libretto in November - in opera you do have to work from the words - and I started composing in December. It was very short and very intense, composing for at least ten hours a day, every single day for 6 months.
EO How did you work with Sam Holcroft and Katie Mitchell?
VM We met last year, and the first thing we did, also with Lindsey Turner (dramaturge), was to decide which angle we´d like to approach this story from From the beginning, it was clear for me the political element shouldn´t be addressed, I was more interested in tackling its phsycological implications.
EO Did your interpretation lead the work?
VM When Katie and Sam arrived at the project they were interested in knowing what angle I felt it was the right one, because I’d been busy with it for a while - that was the starting point of our collaboration. Having chosen a path, I then worked almost on a daily basis with Sam: at first she would send me bits of text – until she understood what I responded better to. We would talk very frequently, mostly for editing. Sam was very generous in that aspect, truly open to collaboration. Later on, at the first rehearsal in June, Katie did something quite interesting: she wrote a four-generation genealogy of the syblings, for practical aspects: she wanted to create a baseline for the performers to understand and develop their characters' motivations. This was fascinating to watch.
EO What do you think about enoa?
VM I think enoa has a crucial mission as it is filling a tricky gap that exists between artists at the beginning of their careers and institutions such as festivals, opera houses, etc. Also, through enoa's workshops and events you end up getting to know a huge number of people from all over Europe, some of them very interesting artists. People you feel you might be able to work with at some point in your career - maybe not tomorrow, maybe in five or ten years.
EO How did you feel when you showed your piece to the whole world?
VM The experience of having an idea - something as ineffable as an idea - actually turned into a beautiful set with all these wonderful and gifted artists working on it, it´s both humbling and exhilirating.
EO What are your next projects? With whom would you like to work?
VM I´m now starting a piece for five percussionists; it couldn’t be further away from opera. As for whom I´d like to work with, there are such wonderful performers and directors that it is difficult to name one.
EO If you were to do some new opera work, what would be the piece of literature that you would like to work on would it be a short story? A novel?
VM I really like the short story medium, because it can contain the seeds for everything you need in a rather condensed way. If it is a good one, and if it has potential, you can turn it into a piece that lasts for one hour or three hours, depending on your take and your purposes.
EO Maybe poetry?
VM To have a poetic idea as the starting point for an opera is certainly possible, but it can also be tricky. For me it is more important to start with a strong dramatic idea. And if you have the right librettist, he or she will certainly make sure the poetic elements are present. Having said this, I do love working with poetic text. Last year I wrote a piece (commissioned by Aix, Verbier and Aldeburgh festivals) after a poem by Dylan Thomas, which is one of my favourite poets, and it was a joy to do it. Poetic text is ideal if you are working with songform, for instance. But when you are working in theatre I think you need to make sure the text you´ve chosen does have dramatic potential.
EO What is the last book you have been reading?
VM A novel by P.G. Wodehouse, "The Code of the Woosters"
Opera Magazine
Marguerite Haladjian | Opéra Magazine, 03.07.13
MH (...)Why are you interested in the voice and in musical theatre?
VM The abstract nature of musical language is what makes it the most sublime of arts, but its curse is that it is perceived as outside the world! In opera, drama embodies the sound matter, and carried by voice, anchors music in life. The voice is the most beautiful instrument there is. I am very sensitive to its fragility that exposes the interpreter to all risks. (...)
MH Ambiguous atmospheres seem to stimulate your musical imagination. After PING, based on an enigmatic monologue by Samuel Beckett, you´ve now created THE HOUSE TAKEN OVER, an enigmatic work based on a libretto by Sam Holcroft after Julio Cortazar´s novel. Why have you chosen this particular text, and why is it in English?
VM The musicality and economy of the english language serve well my writing. (...) I was interested in the fantastic dimension that manifests itself by the appearance of strange elements to reality. Unusual noises gradually invade the space of the ancestral home and become unbearable. The brother-sister couple, two solitary beings, cut off from the world, lead a dull and repetitive existence, which increases the gap between the banality of their daily lives and the supernatural manifestations. Behind the appearance of an accurately described real world we guess a strange universe. Reality escapes and brings disorder, to which the audience slides in from the beginning.
MH At the beginning, the characters experience the events without trying to understand the origin of the mysterious sounds that take possession of a part of the house. They take refuge in another room, which is in its turn invaded. In this atmosphere of dramatic tension, how do you translate these two episodes (and the sounds associated to them) into music?
VM At first, they accept without fear the presence of the supernatural that is gradually creeping in, and life is still possible - although difficult. But then, with the second invasion, it really becomes unbearable. The brother leads his sister to escape by abandoning everything, as the sound of the invisible becomes oppressive. Both intrusions are like the escalating process of a unique phenomenon that the musical structure develops through variation, in order to maintain this dramatic atmosphere. (...)
MH Doesn´t this story take place within the characters' interior and secret space?
VM The tragedy of this piece is of an intimate nature. Our reactions, as well as our behaviors reflect our personal history, are very often unconsciously repressed. This 'unsaid' is the fertile ground that nurtures music. (...)
"Mendonça monte sa baraque"
Eric Dahan | Libération, 13.06.13
Après George Benjamin l’an dernier, avec Written on Skin, le festival d’Aix a fait appel à l’un de ses élèves, le Portugais Vasco Mendonça, pour créer un ouvrage lyrique qui sera présenté en création mondiale. Le compositeur a choisi d’adapter, avec sa librettiste Sam Holcroft, une nouvelle de Julio Cortázar écrite en 1946 et intitulée Casa Tomada, qui raconte l’envahissement mystérieux d’une maison où vivent reclus, depuis des années, un frère et une sœur. La menace est-elle vraiment extérieure ? N’est-ce pas plutôt leur enfermement progressif dans des habitudes confinant au rituel qui a aliéné les habitants de cette maison ?«Bien sûr, répond Mendonça. Si la lecture politique de cette nouvelle, écrite sous la dictature, est légitime, sa portée n’en est pas moins universelle. Je l’ai découverte il y a des années, et j’ai été très impressionné. Au départ, on est dans un thriller : qui sont ces gens ? Pourquoi réagissent-ils ainsi ? On comprend progressivement que les habitants n’ont pas peur mais redoutent objectivement les conséquences de cette invasion sur leur vie quotidienne. Le mystère donc n’est plus du côté des envahisseurs, dont on ne saura jamais qui ils sont véritablement, mais du côté de ce frère et de cette sœur qui veulent à tout prix continuer à vivre selon une routine bien établie. Ce qui leur arrive est peut-être un rêve, la matérialisation magique d’une panique d’être dépossédé de soi. Encore une fois, Cortázar n’apporte aucune réponse, et j’aime cette liberté d’interprétation, car elle est très stimulante pour un compositeur.»
Be-bop. Né le 7 mars 1977 à Porto, Mendonça n’était pas prédestiné à devenir compositeur. Certes, son père médecin et sa mère professeure étaient mélomanes, et écoutaient musique baroque, classique, opéra et jazz à la maison. Mais ce n’est qu’à 14 ans que l’adolescent a eu le déclic : «Le be-bop, le cool jazz, je comprenais. Puis j’ai découvert A Love Supreme de John Coltrane, et les disques, de plus en plus free, de la fin de sa vie. Et, là, j’ai vraiment été interpellé.» Il commence donc à apprendre la guitare jazz et décide d’aller au conservatoire municipal, conscient du fait que des bases classiques sont indispensables, quelle que soit la musique que l’on veut jouer ou composer. S’il admire, comme tout le monde, le maître Wes Montgomery, Mendonça se passionne pour deux guitaristes. Le premier, John Scofield, est entré dans l’histoire avec les solos cubistes émaillant le fantastique Decoy de Miles Davis et la tournée qui suivit en 1984. Le deuxième, c’est Bill Frisell, le roi du sustain, dont les volutes atmosphériques font tout le prix du Paul Motian Trio avec le saxophoniste Joe Lovano. Sous leur influence, Mendonça compose dès l’âge de 15 ans des thèmes pour son propre groupe. Deux ans plus tard, il a une nouvelle révélation, celle de la Symphonie d’instruments à vents de Stravinsky et de la musique d’Olivier Messiaen. C’est décidé, il sera compositeur.
Après deux années passées à suivre des cours d’analyse et de composition, il part se perfectionner et rédiger sa maîtrise à Amsterdam, avant de revenir étudier deux ans de plus à Lisbonne. A la fin des années 90, il présente sa musique à George Benjamin et lui demande s’il l’accepterait comme élève pour son année de thèse, ce que le compositeur, qui fut le dernier élève d’Olivier Messiaen, accepte. «Je suis un grand admirateur de la musique de George Benjamin, car elle est au confluent de plusieurs courants actuels mais n’en demeure pas moins originale et personnelle. J’admire son grand métier, sa façon de trouver de nouvelles combinaisons musicales et sonores et de les couler dans une forme théâtrale, riche, élégante, séduisante.»
Liturgie.Le festival permettra aussi d’entendre d’autres pièces de Mendonça comme Drive, un trio pour violon, violoncelle et piano créé en 2003 dont les constants flux de notes et les superpositions de rythmes, mètres, accents et valeurs, trahissent l’influence des Clocks ligetiens et de Harrison Birtwistle. On donnera également son quatuor à cordes, intitulé Caged Symphonies, composé en 2008. La pièce alterne mouvements constants, dialogues entre instrument solo et multiples, sur le modèle des répons dans la liturgie d’église, et enfin, des mécanismes complexes combinant cycles et périodes de structures diverses. Sur le site du compositeur, on peut avoir un aperçu de son écriture avec un fragment de Ping, adaptation lyrique d’une pièce de Beckett.«L’écriture vocale de The House Taken Over sera assez différente de celle de Ping, au sens où il ne s’agit pas d’un texte abstrait mais narratif. J’ai donc essayé de trouver un équilibre entre une écriture très classique, voire belcantiste, qui serve la progression dramatique, et des interventions un peu plus audacieuses, notamment des sauts de registre typiques de l’écriture contemporaine, quand le drame et la psychologie des personnages l’exigent.»
On demande à cet ancien stagiaire de l’Académie européenne de musique, fondée par Stéphane Lissner pour le festival, ce qu’il compte enseigner aux élèves de la master class qu’il animera cette année : «Je ne veux pas influencer leur écriture mais j’aime l’idée de dialoguer et d’exprimer quelque chose avec la musique. Personnellement, la solitude du compositeur me pèse, c’est peut-être pourquoi j’aime de plus en plus partir d’un texte et travailler pour le théâtre. Pour le reste, si je comprends la nécessité esthétique et politique du sérialisme intégral, et l’esthétique du refus des compositeurs de l’avant-garde des années 60, je crois que notre époque est à l’expression et à la communication. Exprimer des choses sensibles et raffinées reste un défi excitant à relever pour tout compositeur d’aujourd’hui.»