27 May 2018

ADÈS: The Exterminating Angel

From Opera on Sunday

A surreal fantasy about a dinner party from which the guests can’t escape.

A scene from The Exterminating Angel at Metropolitan Opera

A scene from The Exterminating Angel at Metropolitan Opera Photo: Ken Howard/MetropolitanOpera

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.

A scene from The Exterminating Angel at Metropolitan Opera

A scene from The Exterminating Angel at Metropolitan Opera Photo: Ken Howard/MetropolitanOpera

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.”

A scene from The Exterminating Angel at Metropolitan Opera

A scene from The Exterminating Angel at Metropolitan Opera Photo: Jonathan Tichler/Metropolitan Opera

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."

A scene from The Exterminating Angel at Metropolitan Opera

A scene from The Exterminating Angel at Metropolitan Opera Photo: Ken Howard/MetropolitanOpera

Synopsis of The Exterminating Angel

Composer Thomas Adès and librettist/director Tom Cairns on The Exterminating Angel:

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