THREE SPEECHES AND A TECHNIQUE

“No less protean and multiform was (…) ‘Three Speeches and a Technique’, a score for voice and ensemble by the composer in residence at Casa da Música in 2024 (…) This union of echoes of Le Grand Macabre (…) with American imprints, and instrumental glissandi with vocal portamenti, gives ‘The Choice’ a polymorphic vivacity that ‘Three Speeches’ retains throughout its development. ‘The Future’, with its progressive political discourse, is a powerful cosmopolitan outlook (…) with constant changes of style and reorganisation of materials, combining with the ensemble a solo voice whose parts are of supreme difficulty due to the continuous succession of new registers, techniques and diversified attacks (…)

Meanwhile, ‘The Recount’ introduces us to an initially delicate and nocturnal atmosphere, with a voice that takes us back to the expressionist beginnings of the 20th century, both for its lyricism and for its harmonic relationship with the ensemble (of Germanic descent). This parenthesis is broken in ‘The Power Fist’, with an opening in which the musicians stamp their feet furiously on the floor, exposing new forms of violence: initially, disjointed; later, amalgamating the discursive organisation of the ensemble around this dialectic of blows and hatred, with greater rhythmic cohesion (…) As in the third Speech, the voice in ‘The Power Fist’ presents parts of harmonisation with strings and woodwinds: a sensitive and poetic elegy that leads the score to a finale of great contrast with the more parodic first movements, so colourful and polyhedral. (…)”
Paco Yañez | Scherzo, 24.01.24

GROUP TOGETHER, AVOID SPEECH

© Rui Teixeira | Casa da Música

“Group Together, Avoid Speech (2012) is exemplary, starting with an orchestral arrangement that could well have been signed by Nunes, placing a woodwind quartet and a string quintet on the first risers. This reinforces Vasco Mendoça's formulation of this score as a modern concerto grosso, extremely varied in the presence of solo voices and timbral colours, so that the dialogue with the works of Nunes and Ravel was as consistent as it was beautiful and direct.

Loosely inspired by T. S. Eliot's poem The Hollow Men (1925), on Group Together, Avoid Speech draws on influences ranging from Wolfgang Rihm in its first movement to Enno Poppe in the nocturnal second, through the delicate melismas of the solo viola and cello duo: one of the many chamber organisations through which Mendonça reorganises and enlivens the orchestra (…) a highly imaginative and texturally varied use of orchestral resources shines through. All this was reinforced by an Orquestra Sinfónica do Porto which, year after year, demonstrates its mastery of contemporary music, greatly improving its interpretative level thanks to continued work with some of the most prestigious conductors in this repertoire, as has once again been the case with Sylvain Cambreling.”

Paco Yañez | Scherzo, 24.01.24

"In Amsterdam, the big friendly wolf of Vasco Mendonça"

Laurent Vilarem | Opera Online, 18.10.22

"What if we had fun rewriting the tales of our childhood? In Little Red Riding Hood, the wolf appears as a terrible predator and the child as a fragile and threatened being. What if we reversed the roles?

This is the mission that Portuguese composer Vasco Mendonça (one of his country's most important) and librettist Gonçalo M. Tavares (a great Portuguese-speaking writer who has been translated worldwide) set themselves in their opera The Little Girl, the Hunter and the Wolf, which premiered at the Amsterdam Opera House. This is a work for children: the hall is full of little blonde heads (sometimes under five) and there is a relative calm before the performance begins.

The story is beautiful: the wolf meets two little pigs but is wounded by a hunter. If he howls, it's because he's hungry: it's in his nature. If he scares people, he regrets it: he is considered a monster because he is different. He meets a young girl with whom he manages to establish a bond. The wolf wants to go to the moon "where there are no more hunters", but unfortunately a hunter finds him. And in the house of the little girl where he has taken refuge, it is finally the hunter who is in the bed to kill him!

It is difficult to know what the children present at the performance thought. One would have thought that they were frightened by the howling of the wounded wolf, especially as the show confronts certain episodes of violence head on. But psychoanalysts have long shown that this intensity is inherent in the cathartic effect of stories. With the exception of one very young child (who will leave at the very beginning of the performance), all the young spectators remain very calm, their eyes fixed on the stage.

Inne Goris' staging is very ingenious. A rectangle covered with leaves makes the objects necessary for the action, such as a door or a tree, appear in a poetic way. Lotte Boonstra's costumes are delightful: the girl's jacket is a bright red, the little pigs have a corkscrew tail, and the wolf's fur on the singer's head is glaringly real. There is a lot of humanity and mischief in the interactions between the characters. The singers are wonderfully suited to their roles: Arturo den Hartog's wolf has not a bass voice as one might have expected, but a countertenor voice (which admittedly lacks a little power). Leonie van Rheden is a very good hunter, but it is Sabra El Bahri-Khatri who lights up the stage in the brilliant role of the girl/red riding hood.

Musically, Vasco Mendonça chose an original formation. The Spectra ensemble is located at the back of the stage and consists of a cello, a clarinet, an electric guitar and a percussion set. With its short rhythmic loops, one is reminded of American minimalism, especially Steve Reich, and even of the music of Louis Andriessen, especially since Mendonça does not soften his instrumental palette. There is a kind of darkness in this opera for children, combined with some very melancholy moments. The little girl, the hunter and the wolf has many elegiac arias in which the characters look at themselves and complain about their condition. Mendonça's lyrical vocal writing includes suspended arias that sound like something out of a John Adams opera or a Broadway musical. The girl's final aria "The World Dances" is the most beautiful poetic achievement of this endearing work.

Because of the many instrumental interludes, the show sometimes seems a little slow, but the strength of Mendonça and Tavares' proposal (as well as the quality of the questions it raises in the children) is such that we hope to see this Young Girl, the Hunter and the Wolf on our French stages again soon."

read original (French) here

"The wolf befriends Little Red Riding Hood in wonderful youth opera"

Anita Twaalfhoven | Trouw, 16.10.22

"Here comes the wolf! The very angry wolf! Hunt him, boil him. Hunt him, roast him. We chop him into little pieces." In the youth opera The Girl, the Hunter and the Wolf, the danger comes from the hunters. Not from the wolf, who is mostly sad and he longs for the moon.

The National Opera, in collaboration with LOD music theatre, presents a beautiful, compact opera that sheds new light on the role of the wolf in well-known fairy tales. Singers and musicians sing and perform around a schematically designed set, in which a wide tray of earth depicts the dark forest. The wolf can dig in, the hunters hide in the bushes and a single door is the home of the piglets and Little Red Riding Hood's grandmother. The battle takes place between the wolf and the hunters who drive up the hungry animal.

A waterfall of sound and music

Countertenor Arturo den Hartog's hairy wolf mask and nimble stealth make him an intriguing character who is half-man, half-wolf. In his melancholic singing, weeping can be heard in elongated exclamations. His counterpart mezzo-soprano Leonie van Rheden is therefore a powerful hunter who scares the hell out of him in staccato sung phrases.

Vasco Mendonça's composition is a cascade of contemporary music, sounds and sound effects that give the performance a strong emotional charge. The musicians play on cello, clarinet, percussion and electric guitar at the back of the forest, enhancing the magical atmosphere.

Red Riding Hood as a backpacker

The three piglets - there are only two here - also join in. When the hunters turn around, we see their big pink backs with a curly tail. The wolf looks longingly at the full meat, but even though he is so hungry, he does not harm a piglet. He is good friends with Little Red Riding Hood. She is therefore a self-reliant girl who strides through the forest with a big backpack like a backpacker. Soprano Sabra El Bahri-Khatri sings along with the wolf in a dance-like rhythm and is the only one who really makes contact with him.

The surtitles of the Dutch-sung opera seem like a continuous poem because of the short, poetic sentences. Gonçalo Tavares wrote a libretto with multiple layers of meaning. The children understand that this wolf does little wrong and is blamed for everything. "I am not hunting you because you are bad, but because I am afraid," says the hunter. Parents and grandparents have their own associations with the fear of the other or the unknown leading to aggression and persecution.

Even though the text exposes the meaning of the fairy tale, the open-ended ending keeps the mystery alive. The wolf howls at the moon and hopes to find his home there.

read original (Dutch) here

"A triumphal night at Aix-en-Provence"

Ana Rocha | Espiral do Tempo, Winter 2015

(...) the audience reacted enthusiastically to the new piece by the portuguese composer (...) with this score, something luminous, wave-like, like a multifaceted fabric of solar radiations, jumps from the stage to the audience. (...) There is, in this music, a wonderful craftsmanship, agility and technique already seen in pieces such as Boys of Summer (2012) and, above all, The House Taken Over (2013). (...).

"Horror and empathy"

Jorge Calado | Expresso, 01.03.14

(...) When things are made properly and there´s a huge amount of talent, a masterpiece is born. That's what happened. (...) Mendonça sees the unfolding of the plot as the fall into a tilted plane or the evolution of a downward spiral - a sort of tightening of the screw, that points out to another ghostly novella, Henry James' The Turn of the Screw, set into music by Benjamin Britten (also written for a dozen instruments). Mendonça is, therefore, in good company and he rises up to the confrontation. Framed by Alex Eales' meticulously realistic set, the staging is exquisite. Oliver Dunn´s and Kitty Whately´s performances are simply immaculate. (...) Mendonça uses strings, winds and an astonishing percussion set very wisely, in order to create strange compound timbres and colours, crazy rhythms, shocking dissonances, ethereal glissandi (...) The opera stars with a chill - is it the wind? - and ends in an unexpected but very well designed climax. International suceess is guaranteed. (...)

THE HOUSE TAKEN OVER

Stephen J. Mudge | Opera News, 10.13

(...) the Domaine du Grand Saint Jean on the Puyricard plateau is dominated by a ruined sixteenth-century château, chosen by the festival as the venue for this season's world premiere, The House Taken Over , by Vasco Mendonça (...) The atmospheric venue, with its raked seating against a wall of the château, could not have been more propitious for a work that deals with a haunted house. (...) Mendonça's work is refined and subtly orchestrated for a chamber ensemble of strings, woodwind, brass and percussion, with an interesting use of flugelhorns and imaginative combinations of the timbres of the thirteen players. This world of worrying glissandos and disturbing percussion (...) was impressive for its refinement (...)

"Lyric shivers in a haunted house"

Patrick Sourd | Les Inrocks, 17.07.13

(...) With baritone Oliver Dunn (brother), mezzo soprano Kitty Whately (sister), an elegant musical direction by Etienne Siebens of the thirteen instrumentalists of the Asko | Schoenberg Ensemble (...) we are lead into this chilling adventure where Cortazar hints the metaphor of a populist Peronism. (...) A very political skeleton in the closet that Vasco Mendonça refuses to profit from in order to favor the art of mystery and suspense (...), approaching the story from its fantastic side. (...) A new success to credit the Festival d'Aix-en-Provence for, that never forgets to offer us in its programme a contemporary gem.

THE HOUSE TAKEN OVER

Michael Milenski | Opera Today, 23.07.13

(...) (the libretto provided) Mendonça with a structure on which to expound infinite combinations of tones, colors and rhythms (...) One musical delight followed another in an astonishing array of variation elaborated by these instruments. Fortunately the grandstand seating at the outdoor Domaine du Grand St. Jean gave us full view into the pit where the evening’s excitement took place. Plenty of it. Cerise sur le gâteau: the trumpeters at the finale abandoned their horns in favor of melodicas (...)

"A house of silence haunted by music"

Jonas Pulver | Le Temps, 11.07.13

A brother, a sister. Already grown up. Their childhood is distant, yet they live in the shadow of the family’s furniture, good as gold, amongst the parental remains of a declining middle class. Their existence is for maintenance, their reason of living is preservation: objects, books, photographs are the sarcophagi of remembrance, the dikes of memory and identity against the backwash of oblivion and independence.

(…) THE HOUSE TAKEN OVER seduces by its fine atmospheres, anxious and oppressive, and by the ambitious interweaving of a hyperrealist and extremely controlled staging, and a music halfway between evocation, figuration and expressionism. (...) the disturbing noises that invade the house, do they exist anywhere but in themselves, beyond their relationship, out of this mould? The vase that brakes, the lamp that falls, are they anything other than the work of their own hands? All the strength of the production is that it leaves this ambiguity unresolved, so we can better hear the music as the vector of (the characters’) inner torments. Yes, in this silent house, the score doesn’t illustrate the apparent action. It haunts the subjective - and thus truly unheard - ties to ordinary objects, through gently mechanized instrumental strata. It speaks, also, of the weight of these material proceedings habit has turned into real characters (…) And then the writing allows a sudden, raw, striking lyricism to emerge. It allows this interstitial space between brother and sister, between their gaze and the creation of their tangible reality, between stage and audience, to be heard. Vasco Mendonça’s music (…) possesses an essential quality in lyric theater: it provides meaning.

"Homemade bizarre"

Éric Loret | Libération, 10.07.13

You bet strangeness has succedeed. (...) The result (of Aix Festival´s new commission) is a stream of unconscious anxiety, with its scent suddenly returning "to the surface", says Mendonça, "as a school of fish." With its tight and psychological structure, THE HOUSE TAKEN OVER is reminiscent of Schoenberg's Erwartung, and Poulenc and Cocteau´s La Voix Humaine - but with two heroes instead of one. Here everything is chamber-like: the orchestra (thirteen musicians), the story and the setting. Sam Holcroft´s libretto (in english) transposes a short story from Cortázar, "Casa Tomada", lasting an hour and divided into three episodes, each one shorter than the previous. (...) Holcroft (...) moves the cursor to neurosis by adding two elements (...): the Sister´s obsession with maternity (...) and a strange final scatological burst (...). Katie Mitchell plays (...) a space inhabited and uninhabited, leaving throughout the whole hour a part of the scene literally haunted by the void.

(...) Mendonça seems to have had at heart the materialization of his "school of fish" metaphor, playing all possible percussive colours, directly tapping not on the heroes' fears but on their doubts, their screen-memories, on the unformulated, on the swampy mind. The reduced ensemble (almost an instrument by part) serves a shimmering and tectonic fabric, each timbre, each colour being both a clutch and a point of the harmonic framework. (...)

THE HOUSE TAKEN OVER

Gilles Macassar | Télérama, 10.07.13

(...) It remains the inventive music of Vasco Mendonça, a disciple of George Benjamin with a very steady craft. Assigned to an ensemble of thirteen musicians (...), it brings to this stifling huis-clos its share of evasion and onirism. An abundant and very colourful percussion (bells, guiro, wood block, vibraphone, triangle, roto toms) evokes, through repetitive cells, the bustling and manic housekeeping of the two characters. The strident harmonies of the brass (two trumpets and trombone), translate, at regular intervals, the rise of anxiety and confusion in the Brother (baritone Oliver Dunn) and Sister´s (mezzo Kitty Whately) souls. By its subject and its atmospheres, THE HOUSE TAKEN OVER evokes "The fall of the House of Uscher", Debussy´s unfinished opera, or Béla Bartók´s "Bluebeard´s Castle". A prestigious lineage in which you want Vasco Mendonça to fully enroll soon in his own right.

"The substantive terror of THE HOUSE TAKEN OVER"

Marie-Aude Roux | Le Monde, 08.07.13

(...) The quality (of THE HOUSE TAKEN OVER) relies firstly on the excellent libretto british playwright Sam Holcroft has created from Julio Cortazar's novel (...), a disturbing huis-clos somewhere between Poe and Ibsen. A brother and sister - Hector and Rosa - live isolated in their family home. Terrifying noises are heard, which require them to take refuge in increasingly cramped rooms, only to find themselves in the threshold of the house. They will have to choose: stay and die in an asthenia of their living space or leave and finally face life. Katie Mitchell´s sophisticated and literal staging, with its doll house set, observes the obsessive rigor of domestic rituals, the clinical movement of bodies, the objects in a sort of mechanical ballet (...) Written for a chamber ensemble (thirteen instruments), Vasco Mendonça´s elegant score seems to reproduce the strangulation of the space on stage. Allusive or repetitive forms, dark coloured continuums, passages of lethal harmonies, all are in agreement with the confinement ceremony. But structure escapades, a sometimes very free lyricism, and unusual sounds such as those of the melodicas (...) talk of a possible elsewhere. In a remarkable interpretation from beginning to end in the pit or on stage, musicians and singers have defended with rare commitment this music of substantive terror.

"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.

PING

Steph Power | Wales Art Review, 05.04.13

(...) First on the programme tonight came a piece demonstrating MTW’s continued remit to explore new work; the UK premiere of Ping (2011) by the Portuguese composer Vasco Mendonça, (...) a serious and highly capable composer of great promise. The two works (Eight Songs for a Mad King and Ping) made an excellent pair and a fascinating bridge across the generations, showing complementary yet diverse approaches to the worlds of music theatre, language and performance. (...)

The piece was beautifully staged and exceptionally well executed, making the most of an ideal theatrical and acoustical space. In this production, director Michael McCarthy chose to split the solo part between two performers to great effect, with a singer (Helen-Jane Howells in clear, pure voice) ‘ghosting’ the actor/narrator (an equally impressive Nia Roberts) from behind a semi-opaque gauze curtain onto which was projected Aguilar’s flickering black and white patterns. This latter worked with the diffused electronic sounds to create a feeling of internal white noise or static entirely pertinent to the flux of Beckett’s short, repeated phrases and fractured syntax. Also visible behind the gauze were the ensemble of two clarinets, violin, ‘cello and percussion (conducted by Michael Rafferty) from whom emanated music of exquisite lightness and textural plasticity which sought not to ‘interpret’ or ‘enhance’ the Beckett, but rather paralleled its emotional resonances in the most subtle way – in co-witness with the audience, as it were, to the protagonist’s increasingly frustrated recycling of episodic memories.

PING

Hillary Finch | The Times, 29.03.13

(...) the first half of the evening offers a new angle on human distress in the UK premiere of Ping by the young Portuguese composer, Vasco Mendonça. This is a musical response to Samuel Beckett’s dramatic monologue: a white-on-white cameo of consciousness, its language bleached into both panic and stasis by rhythm and repetition.

Beckett seems to be everywhere at the moment: both Cheltenham and Edinburgh will feature his work this summer. And composers are increasingly drawn to counterpoint his verbal music with their own. Mendonça does it with a small ensemble, dominated by the shudders of viola and cello, and the melancholy of bass clarinet and marimba. Michael McCarthy’s production has actor Nia Roberts separated by a gauze from her alter ego, the soprano Helen-Jane Howells. They share Beckett’s text like the shifting light of an unstable psyche: both give superb performances, complemented by an electronic score and a stuttering monochrome video projection by Sandro Aguilar. Just two more shows: be sure to be there.

GROUP TOGETHER, AVOID SPEECH

Jorge Calado | Expresso, 10.11.12

(...) All the stars deserved by the concert are due to the world premiere of Vasco Mendonça's GROUP TOGETHER, AVOID SPEECH, based upon a T.S.Eliot verse. (...) Mendonça has composed a work of great breadth, expressive and virtuosistic, crossed by urges of unrestfulness. At times luscious and lyrical, at times lively and nervous, it was a gratifying surprise.

GROUP TOGETHER, AVOID SPEECH

Álvaro Garcia de Zúñiga | New Music Review Lounge, 22.10.12

"Commissioned by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation for the 50th anniversary of the Gulbenkian Orchestra, the new orchestral work by Vasco Mendonça (Porto 1977), GROUP TOGETHER, AVOID SPEECH was premiered on October 17th, 2012. This is a fine symphonic piece, and one of rare intensity. What comes as a surprise is the use of original timbric combinations, which are of great efficiency (like, for example, the marvellous percussion passage in the work’s second part, or in the third one the trialogue between the double basses section and the double bass and violoncello solos); if the term “efficiency” can be applied to what concerns the listener’s perception, in relation to such a sensible and intelligent orchestral writing as in the case of Vasco Mendonça, an unquestionably enthusing and greatly talented composer.

The work’s beginning is united by a preliminary pulse, from which the concertante apparatus is being developed (a string quintet and woodwind quartet, on more than one occasion summed with the percussion and brass). And what is being established throughout its three parts is a great musical moment, and it would be quite difficult, and above all unnecessary, to try translating it into words.

Just before the first sound is emitted, the composer tells us in the printed programme that “a party is a party” and that on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the orchestra, “this [concert] constitutes a special party”. He also confesses that beyond the festive occasion he tried to recompense both to the orchestra and the foundation the fact that, “without being aware [they played] an indispensable role in [his] formation as musician”.

Retribution achieved, the result is a work that deserves being part of the repertoire of any great orchestra. Thus we hope that the Gulbenkian Orchestra holds the same conviction and will let us hear Vasco Mendonça’s work again very soon. To reprogramme it would be not only an acknowledgement of the value and quality of GROUP TOGETHER, AVOID SPEECH, but also a way of supporting this work and its circulation, so that it may be performed by other orchestras here or elsewhere."

"Happy Birthday, Gulbenkian Orchestra!"

Cristina Fernandes | Público, 20.10.12

(...) In Vasco Mendonça's new work, lastingly applauded by the audience, the orchestra also displayed an expressive commitment and technical ability by presenting a beautiful tone, a good dynamic balance and tension management, be it in the tuttis or in the multiple concertante games the composer played with a broad number of soloists (string quintet, woodwind quartet and timpani/percussion(...). The piece, called GROUP TOGETHER, AVOID SPEECH (inspired in a passage of T.S. Eliot's Hollow Men), displays a solid writing that takes advantadge of the orchestral colours and of the multiple instrumental dialogues when building its textures. The development of constant rhythmic and melodic cycles in the first and third movements gives the discourse a mobility that captures every moment of the listener's attention, contrasting with the lyric and very seductive landscapes of the central movement (...)

JERUSALEM

Bernardo Mariano | Diário de Notícias, 10.07.09

(...) The music of Vasco Mendonça: sensitive, refined, strangely seductive, reactive and reproductive.(...) Within these coordinates, Alexandra Moura and João Rodrigues have convincingly overcome the demands of their parts. Cesário Costa and the Lisbon Metropolitan Orchestra have delivered an excellent performance. (...) A work of memories open to the future.