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"First portuguese ever chosen by ROLEX"

Myriam Gaspar | Sábado, 17.05.15

It was with surprise that Vasco Mendonça received the news that he had been selected for the Rolex Mentor & Protegé program, which allows a restricted group of seven artists from around the world to spend a year with renowned names from various fields. The 38-year-old composer confessed he had never heard of the initiative before that, which has existed since 2002 and brings together emerging artists with the world's leading artists. (...)

It was with renewed surprise that he realised he had been selected for the second round, in which three finalists are chosen for each area - visual arts; cinema; literature; dance; theater; architecture; and music. The last step was to have a personal conversation with the mentor, Kaija Saariaho, with whom he met in Lyon. "The funniest thing is that we talked about everything but music," says Vasco Mendonça, which turned out in the end to be chosen by the Finnish composer. Kaija Saariaho (...) made a point of coming to Portugal to see the environment in which Vasco Mendonça works. The empathy between the two is clear. Vasco Mendonça, who began studying music at age 13, likes to quote Stravinsky when asked about his source of inspiration. After taking his two children to school he goes every day to his office, where he works until 19h. "If inspiration comes, she´ll know where to find me," he jokes. (...)

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"Present composed"

Cécile Balavoine | Air France Magazine, April 2015

(...) Helping young artists establish their careers by partnering with distinguished names in literature, dance, architecture, film, theater, the visual arts and music: this was the idea that inspired Rolex to open its address book and bring out its smartest stationery back in 2002. Toni Morrison, William Forsythe, Robert Wilson, David Hockney and Sir Colin Davis were among the first mentors to receive invitations sent from Switzerland stamped with the watchmaker’s famous crown logo: the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative was born. Every two years since, seven young talents in the arts have been selected by an advisory board of independent experts (...)

In the feld of music, there was still a vast sphere to explore: that of composition. Finnish-born Kaija Saariaho came to cast her (...) gaze on Vasco Mendonça, a young composer born in Porto in 1977. Mendonça, whose first opera, The House Taken Over, was created in 2013 for the Festival d’Aix- en-Provence, is well aware that the support of a master is, and always has been, the path to success. “When they introduced me to the three finalists,” recalls Saariaho, “I wondered which one I could bring the most to. I discussed it with Peter Sellars, who said, ‘Ask yourself instead which one will bring the most to you!’” Saariaho, who lives in France, was interested in Mendonça, who was, in turn, interested in opera. Behind these partnerships, Rolex is discreetly weaving together threads of creativity and friendship by ensuring the mentors and protégés come from the most diverse possible cultures and backgrounds. The one-year collaboration (2014-15) between Saariaho and Mendonça began in Paris. (...) Next came a trip to Mexico, followed by Finland, where the Musica nova Helsinki festival closed with a new work by the young Portuguese composer (...)

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"Rolex mentors announce their artist selections"

Roslyn Lucas | New York Times, 19.05.14

They are the chosen ones—at least for the next year. The Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative has announced the names of the seven emerging artists selected to work with major figures in film, literature, dance, visual arts, music, theater and architecture in a program that pairs them with promising young artists. The pairings are intended to help foster a new generation of talent.

They are: Sammy Baloji, an artist and photographer from the Democratic Republic of Congo, for visual arts; Gloria Cabral, from Paraguay, for architecture; the Portuguese composer Vasco Mendonça for music; the Bulgarian-American Miroslav Penkov for literature; Tom Shoval from Israel for film; the Mexican lighting designer Sebastián Solórzano Rodríguez for theater; and the American Myles Thatcher, a corps de ballet member of the San Francisco Ballet, for dance.

The mentors, announced in October, are Olafur Eliasson (visual arts), Alejandro González Iñárritu (film), Michael Ondaatje (literature), Alexei Ratmansky (dance), Kaija Saariaho (music), Jennifer Tipton (theater) and Peter Zumthor (architecture). Each has chosen his or her protégé from a short-list that Rolex put together after a search led by committees of experts in each discipline.

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"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. (...)

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"Following a composer made of curiosity and restlessness"

Mário Lopes | Público, 21.02.14

We met Vasco Mendonça in his office in Largo Camões in Lisbon, just two days before the opening of The House Taken Over in Lisbon, an opera premiered last July at the prestigious Festival d' Aix-en-Provence.

Inscribed by Télérama magazine in a genealogy which includes Debussy´s unfinished The Fall of the House of Usher, after Edgar Allan Poe´s tale, and described by belgian newspaper Le Soir as "a little gem of concentration and precision," this opera confirms VM as one of the most prominent portuguese names in contemporary music these days. The route of the 1977-born composer illustrates it well. He has studied with Klaas de Vries and George Benjamin, won the Lopes -Graça Composition Award in 2004, been the resident composer at Casa da Música, and it was him the Gulbenkian Foundation commissioned a new piece (Group Together , Avoid Speech) to celebrate its orchestra´s 50th anniversary.(...)

We are, therefore, with VM in his office. In a nearby room, we had been speaking of his fascination with the voice and the role it will have in future works, and addressing a late starting, initially jazz-influenced career. We'd been hearing him speak of his appreciation for the "unerring economy" of the english language.

After the interview, we are hunched over a box of rocks of various types. He scratches a piece of shale and praises its sound. He then tells us not long ago he bought and broke a handful of glasses in order to analyse and register its sound. On the wall is attached an excerpt from Beckett´s Molloy, in which the protagonist describes his sucking-stone sequence.

By now, the opera that´s been touring last month in Luxembourg and Belgium competes with VM´s attention to his next step. A piece for Drumming percussion group. "I'm trying out things I´ve never done before, such as working with the actual matter of the instruments, that is, to use what they are made of as a compositional element": for example, by striking the wood of the Portuguese guitar stored at a corner. "This is quite distant from the more traditional context of opera, but it is a type of work that truly excites me."

From this, we could infer that VM is a composer between two worlds, tradition and the avant-garde, between an experimentalist fervor and the depuration of traditional forms. We could, but that would be a simplistic, reductive reading. "I think the opposition tradition vs experimentalism is a false issue," he says more than once thoughout the interview. "Subversion can occurr in both fields," he adds. This statement grafts onto a generational trait. In his generation, VM points out, "there is certainly less prejudice in the way we look at things, there aren´t any forbidden territories": "If you recognize potential in something, be it Bel Canto repertoire or Drum'n'Bass, there is no reason not to go there." But this trait is a generational context. Beyond that, a composer. Another world.

VM began studying music at age 13, "too late to be a soloist, or even a performer." He came to music through jazz and the Hot Club in Lisbon , where he was first a student and then a teacher. At Academia de Amadores de Música, he did his piano studies. But something seemed to be missing. "I never had that obsessive, selfless relation" with the instrument. His obsession was elsewhere. Flash forward to the present.

VM composed The House Taken Over in six months. For half a year he worked for "twelve hours a day, every single day" - "I have a small son who didn´t see me during that period." It is in designing, composing and creating that he feels accomplished. An activity he was doing even before entering the world of contemporary music. That came when he joined Escola Superior de Música de Lisboa. "I was regularly surprised by things I didn´t understand." He was guided by an innate curiosity, a willingness to learn more, to understand. He was overwhelmed by the " astonishment one has before a cliff, in the sense of the Kantian sublime. "It was the moment he discovered Messiaen and Stravinsky that made him jump. "From then on I´ve been creating my own genealogy as a composer, an endless and constantly evolving process."

Later on, we find him in Holland. He´d finish his MMus Composition at the Conservatorium van Amsterdam, supervised by Klaas de Vries. "It was clear for me I needed to be in a place where I could try, and try, and then try some more. I needed to make music and listen to it, to get it wrong and get it right, and in that process to find my own voice. " In 2004, he would candidly explain to Independente newspaper the urgency to leave: "In Portugal I´ve had two pieces peformed in four years, in the Netherlands there were more than thirty performances in under two years ." Returning to Portugal, then leaving again, this time to London. Not for what London had to offer, but because of a composer, George Benjamin.

VM was working on his first chamber opera, Jerusalem, (based on the book by Gonçalo M. Tavares and directed by Luis Miguel Cintra), premiered in 2009. Benjamin, in his turn, was starting Written on Skin, the opera he would premiere in 2012 at the Festival d'Aix-en-Provence. With Klaas de Vries, VM had learned to think music, and his goals as an composer, in a different way. With Benjamin, " a kind of genius craftsman", he refocused his attention on music "as sound event" and music-making as "craftsmanship."

Here we are, then, two days before the Portuguese premiere of The House Taken Over, a work which concentrates two of his major interests as a creator. On one hand, the voice. "It's the most extraordinary of all instruments. Because of its ability to carry text, but not only that. The combination of risk and fragility it represents, and at the same time, the level of expressiveness it can achieve, make it very important to me. I'll probably be busy with the voice in the next few years." Besides the voice, a recurring interest in drama - mirrored in the Cortazar tale, where two syblings startle over a house occupied by no-one-knows-what. "I'm very interested in human behavior. What do certain people have an unusual behavior? What 's behind that? ".

In him, we could say the keyword is curiosity. To question more, to discover more, to get somewhere else. Whether by re-reading Samuel Beckett, who has been a creative trigger for a number of pieces ("there's something in him that moves me deeply"), or by exploring the human voice, or multimedia when it is called for (it happened in Ping , a piece made in 2011 with filmmaker Sandro Aguilar), or the natural plasticity of sound (as he´s doing now in the Drumming piece) or even through the desire of composing a large-scale opera - "hopefully it will happen in the future, I certainly want to do it".

Vasco Mendonça. Composer born in Portugal, but not necessarily a Portuguese composer. "I´m not interested in this element of "portugality", I see myself as a composer, not as a Portuguese composer - it runs the risk of becoming superficial when everything is globalized and we have contact with the work of people from all over the world." A creator that looks with "deep sorrow" to the state of portuguese culture in 2014. "This sticking of economy to culture, through the jargon of creative industries, is a dangerous speech", he points out. "Of course there is an economic benefit from cultural activities, but we need to acknowledge that part of what is done in culture can and should not aim to make profit."

But that is the country outside. In here, in the office that became his workshop, VM will go on. "I just want to keep doing what I do. Always with the willingness to do things differently than I have done in the past, and to venture myself into unknown territories." This dimension of risk is rather important to him. He wants to explore different artistic fields, to search for new combinations. To avoid complacency: " What defines most of the artists I admire, musicians or not, is that element of restlessness," he says.

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"Thrilling opera takes over the Grand Théâtre"

Cordula Schnuer | Wort.lu, 02.02.14

Contemporary opera THE HOUSE TAKEN OVER by Portuguese composer Vasco Mendonça is coming to Luxembourg's Grand Théâtre. Wort.lu/en spoke with the artist (...) THE HOUSE TAKEN OVER is based on a 1946 novella of the same name by Argentinian writer Julio Cortázar. It explores the lives of a brother and sister, both adults, who live together in the same house. When they start hearing strange noises in the house they are forced to leave one room after the other behind and confine themselves to an ever smaller space in their home. Composer Vasco Mendonça first stated developing the opera in 2011 in a series of workshops held at the Aix-en-Provence Festival. Last year, the opera premiered at the festival. “I knew the novella for quite a while,” explained Mendonça, explaining that the strangeness of the story attracted him to the project. With a narrator who cannot always be judged reliable, the story is both an “intimate drama” and a “thriller,” according to the composer. It also asks some pertinent questions. If the house is indeed haunted, why don't its inhabitants simply leave. Something even more terrifying must be waiting for them outside, Mendonça said. With the original text ambiguous on what it actually is that takes the house over, there is a lot of room for psychological drama. It could be a “projection of their own anxieties,” Mendonça argued. At the same time, for a stage production, the audience needs to be able to see something, he added. However, “there are no closed answers.”

Relentless opera in English

With a libretto by British playwright Sam Holcroft, whose Edgar and Annabel was produced by the National Theatre in London in 2011, the opera is in English, an unusual language for the genre. “I wanted it to be in English,” Mendonça explained, adding that he needed to compose for a language he is fluent in. “Portugese is a very tricky language to put into music,” he added, saying that he had struggled with his mother-tongue before. English with its ability to “say a lot in a few words” and the possibility for “fast, direct” exchanges fitted perfectly, Mendonça said. “There is a drive going through the piece, a certain relentlessness.” The hour-long show is, however, not only suitable for opera connoisseurs. Its different layers offer different points of entry for the audience, Mendonça said, whether it is the story itself or the musical language. “We've had wonderful responses from people of all ages and backgrounds who were touched by different things,” he said of the opera, which travels to Bruges and Lisbon after its Luxembourg run.

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"European Opera"

Jorge Calado | Expresso, 19.10.13

(...) Although opera houses figures, companies and audiences have been increasing in the last 50 years - even in countries with no operatic tradition - the current economic climate and ongoing financial crisis are constant threats. It was with the intention of fighting this state of affairs that enOa was born. (...) Since 2011 enOa has made four productions, two of them - "Elena" (1659) by Francesco Cavalli and Mendonça´s opera - premiered this summer at Aix-en-Provence Festival. (...) Based on a short story by Julio Cortazar ("Casa Tomada, 1944), THE HOUSE TAKEN OVER, premiered this July, has started its european tour in Antwerp (seen on September 12); Luxembourg, Bruges and Lisbon will follow. In its scale, it is a small masterpiece, tense as the tightening of the screw, valued by Katie Mitchell´s brilliant staging. (...)

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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 (...)

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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"

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"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.

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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 (...)

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"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.

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"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. (...)

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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.

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"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.

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"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.

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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. (...)

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