“After having effectively introduced the French song “À la claire fontaine” in the Chinese setting of The Painted Veil, it shouldn’t be surprising that renowned film composer Alexandre Desplat has rendered a Japanese short story into a French chamber opera. Entitled En Silence, it’s a masterful evocation of very subtle hues of different kinds of silences between the three main characters. Desplat’s canvas are the spaces between them, their intersecting points, and their increasingly diverging paths. No stranger to portraying tension between characters and their inner dramas in music, Desplat has explored these themes in over 150 films, such as Lust, Caution (set in Japan), or Benjamin Button. His music also explored Wes Anderson’s quirky Japan in The Isle of Dogs. In fact, instead of attending the Academy Awards as a nominee of Best Film Composer for The Isle of Dogs, Desplat chose to be present in Luxembourg where his latest Chamber Opera, En Silence, was premiered to an appreciative audience at the Grand Theatre du Luxembourg on 26 and 27 February, 2019...”
https://www.litrony.com
“L’usage de cloisonner les genres et les pratiques, qui dépend souvent de tropismes plus ou moins nationaux ou culturels, conduit parfois à rendre certains créateurs prisonniers d’une catégorie où ils s’illustrent le mieux. Ainsi Alexandre Desplat, reconnu et récompensé pour ses musiques de film, a-t-il reçu, de la part des Théâtres de la Ville du Luxembourg la commande de son premier opéra, créé le 26 février 2019 dans le Grand-Duché. C’est le format de chambre que le compositeur a retenu pour En silence, adaptant, avec Dominique Lemonnier, dite Solrey – elle signe également la mise en scène – une elliptique nouvelle homonyme de Yasunari Kawabata, dans la petite salle modulable du complexe théâtral, aux dimensions et disposition idéales pour cette création délicate...”
http://www.anaclase.com
“The paralysed writer Omiya Akifusa is deprived of his language, his ges- tures and his words. How can a creative individual still live when deprived of his means of artis- tic expression? What becomes of his story, his past, his present and how does the Other invent his future? Interwoven with questions on creation, transmis- sion, memory, and loss, Yasunari Kawabata’s metaphysical short story oscillates between apparition and extinction and brings into play an alternation between the tangible and the world beyond, the inner and the outer, silence and music. The road that leads Mita to the home of the Master and his daughter Tomiko is an initiatory journey through a tunnel near a crematorium where errant souls mingle with the ghost of a young woman. Who is she? What does she symbolise? Will she materialise? The journey takes us to the edges of this strange tale in which the audience is led into an irrational, ambiguous world where oft- grotesque humour combines with tragedy to witness the metamorpho- sis of Tomiko, a young woman sacrificed to the father figure. For this chamber opera production with its spellbinding music and lyrics by Alexandre Desplat, the singers will move about in a horizontal, abstract, minimalist space. Their songs will seem to be enveloped in a spectral light to create a floating, indistinct, ghostly world. The ten musicians at the rear of the stage will appear as key characters in the dramaturgy. Dressed in baroque costumes and positioned in a single, slightly raised line, they will appear to represent a luminous chromatic scale: the reminiscence of an orchard in springtime, offering an open and vibrant horizon for the Master’s gaze, a depth of field conducive to brin- ging life to dead souls capable of being reborn indefinitely in this pur- suit of beauty, this quest for Nature so dear to the author. In the centre of the stage, a black and white space represents the house where the Master will sit in silence with his back to the audience; a fundamental presence facing the musicians and flanked by the two singer-protagonists Tomiko and Mita. Downstage – an area symbolic of writing – the narrator will perform several roles and take possession of the story. Between these three materialised worlds, a mental space will emerge through a video haunted by the image of the writer: symbols, calligraphy, phantasms, flashes. Solrey”
https://www.bouffesdunord.com
