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Located in the USA
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- Søren Nils Eichberg
Oryx and Crake (2022)
- Edition Wilhelm Hansen Copenhagen (World)
Commissioned by Das Hessisches Staatstheater Wiesbaden
- 2222/4221/timp/perc/synth/pn/str
- soprano/mezz/alto/barithon/tenore/basso
- 1 hr 40 min
- Hannah Dübgen and Margaret Atwood
Programme Note
„Oryx and Crake“ tells the story of the only human survivor on Earth. In flash-backs, revealing only bit by bit, we must ourselves put together the pieces of the drama that lead to the apocalypse. The opera unfolds within 24 hours, beginning at dawn and finishing the next morning.
Atwood’s love-triangle offers plenty of classic music drama, her dystopia is painted in complex, industrial soundscapes and the post-armageddon solitude in contemporary-contemplative open spaces. Electronics extend and augment the orchestral colours and help achieving the unreal „haunted“ atmosphere and the different reality levels of the protagonist’s memory.
"Oryx and Crake" was nominated in the category of "World Premiere" at the International Opera Awards in 2023.
Scores
Features
- New Opera Highlights from Wise Music Classical
- Wise Music Classical invites you to explore new highlights from our opera catalogue. In these recent and upcoming premieres, new productions, and premiere recordings, our composers and their creative collaborators explore subjects ranging from the historical (Hadrian, X: The Life and Times of Malcom X, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly) to the futuristic (Oryx and Crake), the fantastic (El Ultimo Sueño de Frida y Diego, Florencia en el Amazonas, Die Kinder des Sultans) to the thoroughly contemporary (Innocence, The Shell Trial). Threaded throughout these works are perennial themes of loss, longing, magic, art-making, and community.
- 2024 Opera Highlights
- Ahead of Opera America’s 2024 Opera Conference and the World Opera Forum, Wise Music Classical invites you to explore new highlights from our opera catalogue. Across major premieres, new productions, and first recordings, our composers and their collaborators explore both timely issues and the timeless themes of love, desire, and belonging.
- Margaret Atwood inspires
- Known for her powerful stories and her piercing depictions of the world, award-winning novelist Margaret Atwood has gone on to inspire the operatic world.
Reviews
Classical orchestral instruments are tonally combined with electronics, supported with leitmotifs [...]. Feelings and moods are described with charming, sometimes sweet melodies. Strong musical stimuli are created through rap music. Eichberg's lively musical language has a broad spectrum: it is predominantly thoughtful, sensitive and very creative. It invites one to pause and perceive intermediate tones. At times, one is reminded of the sequence of a requiem. Fortunately, the composition gives hope for a happy ending. The bell motif, which heralds the respective events with four strokes, makes one prick up one's ears.
Tone colours and maelstrom-like rhythms surprise again and again.
[The music] is almost classically operatic because it is composed, not against, but for the singing voices. In the narrative and conversational passages, it follows the natural prosody of the English language. Again and again there are cantilenas in which the voices can unfold.
In the orchestral part, Eichberg mixes up the silences, utilizing whatever he can use from the 20th century fund. There is even a leitmotif that is introduced at the beginning and is heard again and again throughout the course of the evening. Avant-garde is combined with rock. [...] The frequent marking of the pulse by percussion and powerful basses contributes to the tangibility of the music. A late romantic orchestration is confronted with the sound of a synthesizer.
The rhythmic variety of the music, its witty references to numerous styles and musical traditions, together with the fusion of large orchestral instrumentation with synthesiser sounds, already familiar from Eichberg's opera "Glare", result in a very specific, highly interesting sound experience - together with the message of the work, "Oryx and Crake" is the opera of the hour […]. Who would have thought that music theatre could be so close to the pulse of time.
Classical orchestral instruments are combined with electronics, over long stretches that has a tonal effect, partly intricate, partly spherical, there are sweet string melodies, leitmotif elements, danceable moments, veritable opera singing [...]. There is no fear of contact with the verve of film music.
Often, meditative euphony resounds from Eichberg's score. Electronics are mixed in moderately. All the vocal parts are decidedly songlike. The melodic lineament for Snowman moves through introvertedly lyrical regions.
[Eichberg] has musically transferred the oppressive mood of Atwood's novel to Oryx and Crake with pronounced spherical drones and whimpers. Bird and natural voices are musically transferred. Electric sounds emphasise the futuristic character of the piece.
The music [...] sounds no less imaginative. Søren Nils Eichberg makes skilful dramaturgical use of its multiple effects. Music is used to illustrate, psychologise, dramatise and release emotions.
Søren Nils Eichberg once again composed speech and expressive songs based on a harmonic foundation in vocal registers that enable the protagonists to sound beautiful even in expressive scenes. He was primarily concerned with situational emotions in an underlying dystopian mood throughout.
With "Oryx and Crake", Søren Nils Eichberg has created something new for the opera stage.