José Maria Sánchez-Verdú, El viaje a Simorgh : (Premiere) Soloists, Coro y Orquestra Titular del Teatro Real, Gelabert-Azzopardi Companyia de Dansa, Experimentalstudio für akustische Kunst e.V. Freiburg, Jesús López Cobos, conductor, Teatro Real, Madrid, 15.05.2007 (GPu)

Conductor: Jesús López Cobos
Director and Set Designer: Frederic Amat
Costume Designer: Cortana
Lighting Director: Vinicio Cheli
Choreographer: Cesc Galabert

Cast:

Amado: Dietrich Henschel
Amada: Ksenija Lukić
El/La Seminarista: Carlos Mena
Archimandrita: José Manuel Zapata
Ben Sidra: Marcel Pérès
Don Blas: Jesús Castejón
La Muerte: Paola Dominguin
Joven Señor Mayor: Josep Ribot
Doña Urraca: Celia Alcedo
La Doña: Itxaro Mentxaka
Kirguís: Oswaldo Martin
Camarera: Sara Moros
Pájaro solitario: Cesc Gelabert (dancer), Ara Malikian (violinist)

Violas da gamba: Viviana González, Ruth Robles, Jorge Miró
Saxophone: Andrés Gomis Mora

 

A recent visit to Madrid gave me the chance to catch the eighth (and penultimate) performance of the première run of a new opera by José Maria Sánchez-Verdú, the actual première having been on the 4^th of May.

Sánchez-Verdú, born in Algeciras in 1968, currently lives in Berlin. Active as composer and conductor, he also teaches Composition at the Robert-Schumann-Musikhochschule in Düsseldorf. He has an extensive catalogue of compositions behind him, including commissions from, inter alia, the Biennale für Neue Musik in Hannover, the Schleswig-Holstein Musik Festival, the Orquesta Nacional de España, the Orquesta Sinfónica de Madrid, the Staatsoper Berlin (the chamber opera Silence in  2005), Münchener Biennale (the chamber opera, GRAMMA in 2006) - and the Teatro Real of Madrid (this work). Gramma, which sounds to be a fascinating and innovative work, was reviewed by the sadly missed John Warnaby (see obituary by Marc Bridle, Ed.)

My comments on El viaje a Simorgh should be read in the light of the fact that my command of Spanish is decidedly limited. This is especially significant with regard to the work of a composer who has pronounced literary interests. Sánchez-Verdú prepared the libretto himself and it  draws on a whole repertoire of texts. At its core is the novel Las virtudes del pájaro solitario (1988) by Juan Goytisolo (available in English translated by Helen Lane as The Virtues of the Solitary Bird, Serpent’s Tail, 1991). It draws extensively on Mantiq Ut-tair or The Conference of the Birds, the mystical-allegorical poem by the twelfth century Persian poet Farid ud-Din Attar. It quotes extensively from the poems of St. John of the Cross; there are passages from Ramon Lull, from Paul Celan, the Song of Songs and, no doubt, from other sources I couldn’t identify.

Staged with the use of elaborate projections, spectacular lighting effects, a team of dancers, mingling spoken parts with sung parts, drawing on the idioms of the western avant-garde, on Renaissance Spanish music, on violas de gamba and on amplified violin, on Islamic chant and on both pre-recorded and live electronics, El viaje a Simorgh was an all-embracing theatrical project. Attempting to draw on and synthesise so much diverse material it was perhaps not surprising that it suffered, at times, from a degree of fragmentation. As one scene followed another it was by no means always easy to see what the connections were, to find the thread of unity (I don’t think my problems were explicable purely in terms of my deficient Spanish). Many ‘characters’ appeared only briefly or in scenes so far apart that there was no possible way to think of them in terms of their ‘development’ or coherence.

The essential pattern was structured along two chief ‘narrative’ lines. In one the human figures were first encountered in a kind of steam bath/brothel and were marked out by Death, dying of plague, radiation, Aids etc.  In the other narrative thread, the birds, as they do in Attar’s poem, set out in pilgrimage to the court of the Simorgh, King of the Birds, a figure of god, or of self-realisation. The birds’ journey – with its casualties and its defectors – is represented balletically (some of the choreography being rather banal and predictable), the Simorgh being presented through a single dancer and an onstage violinist (the excellent Ara Malikian). In the human world there are scenes of torture and death, but also the gradual emergence of images of a kind of redemptive love, as The Man Beloved/Amado and The Woman Beloved/Amada struggle to find one another; The Man Beloved writes a text about the nature of the Solitary Bird; another character sings a hauntingly beautiful song which fuses words by St. John of the Cross and the great Arab poet of Sufism, Ibn al Farid. A library is burned; a list of forbidden texts is declaimed, but the letters of the alphabet emerge anew from the flames. Torture and censorship are opposed by love, both secular and divine. The birds continue their journey – their final realisation being that what they seek is, finally, themselves. In the Persian text this works as a kind of pun: thirty birds complete the pilgrimage -the word si means thirty and morgh is the plural of bird. In El viaje a Simorgh the finding of the Simorgh has as a prelude an exquisite love duet between The Man Beloved and The Woman Beloved, in which the two finally meet and embrace (with appropriate chasteness). Human and avian narratives thus effectively combine at the opera’s conclusion. The return of Death, and a kind of braying comment on the saxophone, precludes any easy sense of triumph, however.

Sánchez-Verdú’s music was inventive and intriguing almost throughout. The presence of Marcel Pérès, best known for his work with Ensemble Organon, brought a profound spirituality to parts of the work; Carlos Mena’s countertenor voice and impressive stage presence were striking in the role of the bisexual/hermaphroditic El/La Seminarista. The German bass-baritone Dietrich Henschel sang with both power and subtlety and his final duet with the excellent Ksenija Lukic was a thing of great beauty. The orchestral sounds were often produced in unconventional ways, the conducting of Jesús López Cobos at all times attentive to the needs of the singers. The balance between voices and orchestra was particularly fine - how far this was due to the acoustics of the Teatro Real and how far to the judgement of the conductor was hard to determine.

Overall my impression was of a powerful night’s theatre, with some fine music and some moments of puzzlement. There was quite a lot of good singing to be heard and while I was thoroughly convinced of Sánchez-Verdú’s qualities as a composer. I was a little less sure about the wisdom of his being his own librettist. Clearly the text represented his vision, and one could understand his desire to be in ‘control’ of that vision. But I wonder if working with a sympathetic librettist might not have been of benefit by giving him another creative mind to rub up against, to disagree with, to be stimulated by, to be criticised (or praised) by. There were scenes which seemed just a little self-indulgent, which lacked the tightness that might possibly have been generated by such a collaboration. But this is merely speculative. What the actual performance of El viaje a Simorgh offered was ambitious and intelligent, more successful than not and, at its best both richly thought-provoking and spine-tingling. Certainly the last scene, with blazingly sonorous trumpets played around the highest balconies of the theatre and with mirrored dervishes whirling on stage, is a moment of theatre that will not be easily forgotten.

Sánchez-Verdú is a composer of distinct individuality and seriousness of mind. I shall certainly make efforts to hear more of his work.

 

Glyn Pursglove