by It is a cliché that is as regular as clockwork after an inexplicable tragedy: “That was the day we lost our innocence”. But do we really start from a place of innocence or are we always somehow involved in violent clocks? Put perpetrators from the outside, or are they an expression of something inherent in the community, its monstrous ID? These questions follow the halls of the Finnish composer Kaija Saariahos extraordinary contemporary opera as safe as they will disturb the dreams of his audience.
The innocence begins with a deeply threatened series of chords from the lowest key on the piano, since swirling strings and grin bassos are interrupted with the trills and the higher wooden windows from the legal by percussion. It does not start to cover it atmospherically. The music has tones from Bartók and Góracki, with more than a little master of Dread, György Ligeti. The singers continue to send when the curtain rises and explains that they “no longer go to work” that they “cannot have my back to the door”. Trauma encourages everyone; These people were clearly exposed to unspeakable horror.
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We will soon find out that 10 years after shooting the mass school, we are a wedding celebration that implies the groom’s family, but was held by the bride. Only the waitress that serves the drinks threatens the mood when she gathered the family at the wedding. It shows that she is the mother of one of the victims and does not know when she took over the job that she would go into the cave that the monster built. But everything that has been suppressed will be resurrected to cause chaos, and the effects of violence cannot simply be put away.
While the events of the wedding merge with the tragedy itself, the polyphony is shifting in the score in and from harmony and dissonance. Saariah’s ability to conjure up loud originality about the psychological precision of sofi Oksanen and Aleksi Barrières Libretto. Different languages - Finnish, English, French, Spanish and German – are not only used by the Sonic range, but also expand the effects. The result is a work of the amazing depth and multiplicity of the kind that you rarely find in the opera.
Director Simon Stone builds and supports a vision for this piece, which is often astonishing. It is certainly impossible to imagine that it is done in any other way. Its set, which was designed with stylistic virtuosity of Chloe Lamford and cleverly illuminated by James FarnCombe-a building from the middle of the century on a slow rotation, which is divided into separate but connecting rooms that are completely transformed over the course of the opera. A restaurant becomes a classroom in the time that requires a single rotation. It is a miracle of Stagecraft, but it never overwhelms the narrative or becomes a gimmickry.
Rooms are of crucial importance for innocence, their tendency to grasp and isolate exactly the people for which they are protected. Spaces change not only physically, but also mentally before our eyes, and the characters that crawl through them seem solid and spectral at the same time. It could easily develop in abstraction, become confusing or abstruse, but stone never loses the mental conditions or emotional inserts of the characters. The clarity and truth does not fluctuate with all schedules.
Thirteen individual characters form the line -up, and everyone is perfectly delimited (and beautifully sung). Faustine de Monès and Sean Panikkar are the bride and groom, which are painfully impaired by impending revelations and desperately adhere to an idea of love that increasingly looks like after rejection. Claire de Sévigné and Jenny Carlstedt are both excellent than the two brittle but strong mothers who are responsible for the terrible stress of loss and guilt. Teddy Tahu Rhodes is a wonderfully resigned local priest, and Lucy Shelton is heartbreaking as the teacher who could not save her indictment and knows that she will never teach again.
The children – which we see bloody and sacrificed in the past and are hopelessly destroyed in the present – are professionally pulled, their fear in every muscle manifests itself. Rowan Kievits is a nervous chaos, and Julie Hega makes a terrifyingly articulated accomplice and blows massive holes into the idea of the victims as guiltless innocent. The best thing is, for the ambiguity of her motivations, the strength of her presence and the beguiling eccentricity and essential purity of her voice, Erika Hammarberg is an important victim of Markéta. It is practically impossible to pull her eyes off her.
Innocence is a monumental performance that reacts courageously and deeply to contemporary life. His characters feel deeply and frighteningly accessible and drive in a rotating nightmare that they cannot escape. The number of points is wonderfully strange to combine euphony and discord into an integrated, almost holy whole. It is carried out great by Clément Mao-Akacs and brightly played by the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra. Opera is often seen as a moribund art form, but this shows how important it can be. They may lose any abundance of innocence in which they have gone, but they will emerge more people from experience.
