One week to become characters, wearing costumes, getting comfortable with the stage, living voice to the score, staging and giving life to an opera written for the festival by the innovative Austrian composer Manfred Länger. The title will soon be announced on the festival website.
Programme
Title
Cello Rising
Manfred Länger, composer
Elisenda Carrasco, conductor
Rob Kearley, director
Bridget Kimak, designer
Dear Singers and Choir-conductors!
I excuse myself for not writing an opera with wolves, with batman, with a loving pair, with a poor boy, who will become a millionaire, or with princesses and princes. Everybody who wants to sing in a convincing way, IS a princess or a prince. FEELS the Divine inside. So it was not my aim, to write a solo-opera with a choir who is commentating some feelings. I want to write an opera for a whole choir with the whole range of feelings. The audience should have the possibility to take a look inside a choir, not to see only a group of singers, who wear the same clothes, who are singing the same things in the same quality. Of course the 6 Leaders are a little more prominent than other singers, but who says that every singer wants to be prominent in summer of 2012? The act of the opera is maybe at first sight not obviously. It is the story of a group of youths. Their members are different, because they have different parents, grow up under different circumstances... It is no bad intention, that the group of the youths is “washed away by a wave of the Established”. It happened. Because the system is so as it is. But the youths discover a Cellist who lives the power of music and so they have the possibility to feel this power inside themselves. The power makes them strong, also in this scene, where the Cellist is leaving. But also afterwards, when the “wave of the Established” is coming near again. The audience will have to think about many things they see. The opera tries to hold a mirror before the audience. That is not only comfortable. But it is necessary. It is also a mirror for all who perform the opera. Can I discover myself in the two strange and curious waves? Where I am standing inside a group? But also make the experience of all our time inside our choirs: that singing makes us personally firm and strong and great. But this firmness and power is not an exclusive present for me, my singing-neighbour and everybody in the choir got the same present. And this is OK. Because of my own power I can accept the power from the other, and together we are as strong as three are.
The roles for the choir: the choir itself is playing the leading-role. So everybody is the “diva”! Everybody who wants will have at least one speaking-solo, but there are also little ensembles or echo-choirs, also the choir of the Angels in the Finale. It must be made a good organizing job to have the overview of the many little solo-roles. I hope you have fun to act in one of the Adults Wave, to speak a little darker and deeper than normally and to act a little crazier than normally. In a part of the opera you will celebrate a “Festa”. (The 6 Leaders have a greater part, of course, a little more to sing and to act)
Manfred Länger, Vienna, 26th March 2012
She is the conductor of Cor Infantil Sant Cugat and the female choir Voxalba. She has deepened her musical knowledge and conducting techniques with children’s choirs, a field on which she’s been invited to hold courses and seminaries all over the world.
He has a varied career as a director, performer and educator. As associate and assistant director, he has worked with renowned companies and directors at home and abroad. He was a member of the Swingle Singers and Synergy Vocals.
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Click below to download it.
