A surreal fantasy about a dinner party from which the guests can’t escape.
Sunday 27 May at 6.00pm on RNZ Concert
Metropolitan Opera 2018 Season
ADÈS: The Exterminating Angel
Leticia Maynar............ Audrey Luna
Lucía de Nobile........... Echalaz
Silvia de Ávila............ Sally Matthews
Beatriz......................... Sophie Bevan
Leonora Palma............ Alice Coote
Blanca Delgado........... Christine Rice
Francisco de Ávila...... Iestyn Davies
Edmundo de Nobile.... Joseph Kaiser
Raúl Yebenes.............. Frédéric Antoun
Eduardo....................... David Portillo
Col. Álvaro Gómez..... David Adam Moore
Alberto Roc ................ Rod Gilfry
Señor Russell.............. Kevin Burdette
Julio............................. Christian Van Horn
Dr Carlos Conde.......... John Tomlinson
Metropolitan Opera Chorus and Orchestra/Thomas Adès (EBU)
Thomas Adès burst onto the classical music scene in the mid-1990s as the twenty-something composer of the much-talked-about opera Powder Her Face, inspired by a real-life 1960s British sex scandal.
For his second opera, he turned to the arguably more genteel world of Shakespeare with his adaptation of The Tempest, which had its Met premiere in 2012 with Adès conducting.
Now this gifted composer, whose work runs the gamut from chamber music to choral pieces to large-scale orchestral works, is back with his third opera, The Exterminating Angel, a Met commission inspired by the surrealist film of the same title by the great Spanish director Luis Buñuel.
The story of an aristocratic dinner party from which the guests inexplicably cannot leave (and which gradually descends into chaos, complete with live sheep on stage), The Exterminating Angel was a sensation at its 2016 world premiere in Salzburg, with the New York Times hailing the work as “inventive and audacious … a major event.”
The composer says, "I think that the film has a highly tuned sense of the absurd. I mean, it’s on one level a fairy tale, and that’s very good for any composer, especially me. I like that world. It’s also kind of a horror story as well. There are elements of the macabre, the dreamlike, and all of this feeds into music very naturally for me. Also, it feels extremely modern. One of the stars of the film, Silvia Pinal, gave a brilliant interview much later, where she said Buñuel anticipated Big Brother, reality TV, and that is completely right. It’s exactly the same thing—this group of people randomly brought together and not leaving a room for absolutely no reason. And we watch it. In these Big Brother shows, they always deteriorate spectacularly as the weeks grind down. Buñuel saw that coming. And I think he also saw that we, as a human race, would want to watch this."