This is a wild card, a work by a contemporary French composer (born 1952) whose music has been performed under Pierre Boulez with the Chicago Symphony at Carnegie Hall, and who is the resident composer for the Orchestre de Paris and a professor of composition at the Aix-en-Provence European Academy of Music. The opera–just under an hour-and-a-half long–utilizes both electronics and standard instruments, and creates quite an interesting sound-picture. The one-act work takes place in an airport on the 60th Parallel during a storm. All planes are grounded while the storm rages. In addition to a man carrying Einstein’s brain, about which he is on the way to deliver a lecture, there are Anja and Marie, who are on their way to Miami in order for Marie to forget a recent lover. There’s also an old woman and, most importantly, Wim, a fugitive war criminal who in the opening moments recognizes a man named Uwe, who is in possession of “compromising documents”. Wim follows Uwe into the men’s room, where he kills him, but Wim is recognized by Rudy, a law-enforcement official who wants to take him back to Paris for trial. At the close, Wim kills Rudy and disappears as the others sleep, waiting for the plane to take off.
I wish my French were good enough to have gotten more out of the printed libretto–sadly, it’s only in French, a big mistake by the disc’s producers because there is something very engrossing about the work. As hinted, the style is eclectic, including a musical interlude near the close of the first CD that could be mistaken for Alban Berg–and quality Berg at that. It’s an inexpensive set, and if this sort of post-modern, impressively sustained, eerily atmospheric stuff is your cup of tea, you might be very pleasantly surprised.
