Een lied voor de maan

50'

Nationale Opera & Ballet;
Opera Zuid
Theaterakademie August Everding
Fundación Albéniz
La Monnaie/De Munt
Festival d’Aix-en-Provence
European Network Opera Academies

Vera Fiselier, Ginette Puylaert, Francine Vis, Jan-Willem Schaafsma, Berend Eijkhout, Mirna Ackers, Erick Steven Rojas Toapanta, Piotr Lipowicz, Nadia ten Kate, Bart Folkers, Simon Velthuis, Nationaal Jeugdorkest conducted by Leonard Evers.

 

21 March 2019, Online at the Opera Forward Festival of the Dutch National Opera.

A song for the moon, a fable about the power of music, is based on the book of the same name by Toon Tellegen. Composer Mathilde Wantenaar adapted the story into a wonderful ‘my first opera’ for young audiences and their parents: with charming characters, mellifluous melodies and many humorous references to the history of music, from opera classics to pop hits. An accessible and multifaceted performance that does exactly what the story is about: it moves you with music.

 

Toon Tellegen’s imaginative fables are admired by young and old in the Netherlands and far beyond. Tellegen creates a unique world of fables with extraordinary situations and exceptional characters. His tales make you reflect, without becoming moralistic. The narrative of A song for the moon tugged at Wantenaar’s heartstrings. ‘The story immediately appealed to my musical imagination. It touches on important themes, such as loneliness, identity, disappointment and friendship. It is also a piece about the power of music and how people can connect.’

NRC: 'Een lied voor de maan' exudes infectious joy in everything.

 

"There behind you!" You can almost hear the children shouting, when the Mole asks straight into the camera if we have seen the Earthworm sometimes. But the room is empty and what we shout at home to the screen the Mole cannot hear. It's the only time the lack of live audience is really noticeable in family opera A song for the moon , which still premiered a year after its cancellation due to the corona outbreak during the. It's a delightful, well-sung and played, beautifully dressed performance that leaves you wishing for a full house - and vice versa. The mole (endearingly performed by mezzo Vera Fiselier) composes the song from the title to cheer up the moon: it must be lonely up there, which Wantenaar illustrates with a delightful chorus. The animal orchestra performs the song ("A wrought monstrosity, but beautiful," judges the conducting grasshopper), but the moon remains glum. The cricket gives "musicological compositional advice": "The mole should be a cross." In other words: the song sounded too gloomy, raise a few notes and you have major. The mole skims past an existential crisis (should she be a cross?), but it works and the moon is profoundly grateful to her. The story is vintage Toon Tellegen, funny, slightly wry and unobtrusively wise, with sharply struck characters. Wantenaar also hits the characters sharply: the braller frog with his endless outbursts, the pedantic grasshopper, the nuffy field mouse who squeaks the 'Queen of the Night '. Wantenaar's music is bright and accessible but never predictable, spiced with a touch of Latin and a pinch of Gershwin. In the rehearsal scene, she indulged in witty quotations: Beethoven's Fifth with a wavering dissonance, the riff from Roy Orbison's 'Pretty woman'. No wonder the moon shows a smile: A song exudes infectious fun in everything.

 

Joep Stapel, NRC, 22 March 2021.

 

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HET PAROOL: Small 'advantage': the viewer can zap.

 

Festival edition or not: the pandemic also forces the fifth Opera Forward Festival to go completely digital. The programme is packed as ever, with both light and heavier pieces, including from young creators. The fifth annual Opera Forward Festival should have been a party edition, but due to the pandemic, which also threw a spanner in the works last year, everything turned out differently than usual. That is, from the first to the last second digitally. You have to hand it to The National Opera for pulling out all the stops to make it a real festival, with, as it should be, a programme so packed that it was hardly possible to watch and listen to everything. In an interview with DNO' s chief dramaturge Luc Joosten, Pierre Audi, the man who devised the Opera Forward Festival, said that while a digital version of the festival has advantages ("you can zap"), it can still, at best, only offer part of the real experience, namely "undergoingthe live event of unamplified voices singing above an or chestra". "The real experience is a thousand times stronger," Audi said, "no matter how sophisticated the digital version is." Amen, you say. Audi also underlined the importance of the OFF, which wants to "bring young people and young creators to opera, broaden the audience and show that opera is a rich art form with the potential to survive for a long time". One of those young creators is Amsterdam composer Mathilde Wantenaar (27), who, as a music student for the very first OFF, was allowed to write a chamber opera together with other students in order to taste and experience what is involved in such a project. Toon Tellegen The result, personar, was so successful that soon afterwards she was commissioned to write an opera for the festival's main programme. A family performance admittedly, for children aged six and up, but since five co-producers are involved (besides DNO, Opera Zuid, La Monnaie in Brussels, the Festival Aix-en-Provence and Escuela Superior de Música Reina Sofía in Madrid), this is anything but a childish affair. The play, A Song for the Moon, on a text by Toon Tellegen, was streamed yesterday and attracted over 12,000 visitors. It was staged by Béatrice Lauchaussée, whom Wantenaar had met at a meeting of the European Network of Opera Academies. A Song for the Moon is a moving story about a melancholic mole who wants to write a melody for the moon, because he suspects it is lonely. This initially backfires, as the moon sheds a tear when he hears the song. But by turning the mole into a cross (the listener of six is not underestimated), the song becomes joyous. The moon laughs, but the mole remains melancholic and wonders if he himself would become cheerful if he turned into a cross. Fortunately, he gets comfort from his friend the earthworm. Killer aria Wantenaar's music is completely tonal, as if Schoenberg never existed, and peppered with allusions, near-citations and deliberate quotations. Except for a long melisma on the word 'cross', the text is set entirely syllabically. The images Lauchaussée came up with to accompany it are sweet and funny. The frog angling in a tub of water is unforgettable.

 

Erik Voermans, Het Parool, 22 March 2021.