Toward the end of “Lash,” a new opera by Rebecca Saunders, a vocal quartet of invites the listener to “come to bed and die.”
Saunders, 57, is a masterly composer whose recent music is becoming more passionate, expressive and lyrical than ever. An artist whose works are regularly performed throughout Europe, she has won many prizes, including the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at last year’s Venice Music Biennale. Her subtle music has an unmistakable momentum.
The text of the opera is by Ed Atkins, an artist and writer who often uses hyper-realistic C.G.I. video to unsettling effect. A critically acclaimed, career-spanning exhibition of his work is currently on show at Tate Britain in London, and his “Old Food,” which featured sandwiches filled with uncannily modified bodies, was shown at the 2019 Venice Art Biennale. Like his video work, Atkins’s prose is obsessed with the strangeness of sex and death.
On Friday, “Lash” will premiere at the Deutsche Oper Berlin. It is Saunders’s first opera and Atkins’s first libretto. Though Saunders wrote a piece based on words by Atkins, “Us Dead Talk Love,” in 2021, “Lash” is the first time the artists have shaped a piece together from the beginning.
That relationship allowed Saunders to finally take on an opera. “I didn’t want to give a piece to somebody and just let go,” Saunders said. “I wanted to find the author and the directors and the house who would enable us to work on a collaborative project.”
Composers generally begin operas once the libretto is complete; for this project, Saunders and Atkins worked together on the text, which is based on a prose piece from Atkins’s 2016 collection “A Primer for Cadavers.” They pared down and adjusted the words as they went. If one was too much of a mouthful to sing, they came up with alternatives together. Occasionally, Atkins would insist on keeping an ungainly term because he wanted to put a hiccup in the rhythmic flow.
Still, Atkins said, “I was working for Rebecca’s music — for her.” As they shaped the libretto, his goal was always “to give her what she needed,” he said.
“Lash” is directed by the theater collective Dead Centre and performed by an all-female ensemble — the singers Noa Frenkel, Sarah Maria Sun and Anna Prohaska, and the actor Katja Kolm — who represent four facets of a single persona. The work hovers around themes of illness and intimacy. But it doesn’t tell a story in the traditional sense. “Lash” is a largely abstract opera that Saunders called a “poetic space.”
“It’s not telling you what to think or what to feel,” she said. “It’s not painting a narrative. What it’s doing is the experience itself.”
Rather than representing characters, the four singing roles in “Lash” simulate different strands of one consciousness to depict the complexity of a person’s inner life.
Frenkel’s music gets louder as it goes lower, highlighting the power of her contralto voice. Prohaska, a versatile singer with a special interest in Baroque music, sings delicately ornamented lines. Kolm, an actor with a musical background, has a mixture of speech and song. The virtuoso new-music performer Sun must quickly alternate between her high and low ranges.
As the work progresses, these strands merge, generating new ideas as they mix “four different aspects of one persona being shown from a myriad of different angles,” Saunders said. “Each one of us is made up of the potential to be so many different people.”
In Atkins’s libretto, the narrator speaks to a lost lover. Her monologue depicts their intimacy as alternately transcendent and queasy. (A repeating image is of an eyelash stuck in foreskin.) Saunders explored similar territory through Atkins’s writing when she wrote “Us Dead Talk Love.” She was inspired, she said, by the text’s “unashamed sensuality,” and felt uninhibited, because Atkins told her she could do whatever she wanted with the text. “You don’t often get that from an author,” she said.
Born in London, Saunders moved to Germany in the early ’90s to study with the shape-shifting composer Wolfgang Rihm. She has lived in Berlin since 1997, where she has created a body of work ranging from concertos to installation pieces.
Saunders is skilled at blending notes with noise and voices with instruments: In “Yes,” for voice and ensemble, all those elements come together to create a spare but arresting texture. She also creatively manipulates perception. In a 2016 performance of “Still — Extended Choreographic Version,” a work for violin soloist, orchestra, conductor and dancers, the orchestral musicians leaned forward slowly while holding a note. It seemed like the note was sliding downward. But that was a trick the eye played on the ear.
“Saunders concerns herself not only with the phenomenon of pure acoustic sounds,” the musicologist Björn Gottstein wrote in an essay on the composer when she won the prestigious Ernst von Siemens Music Prize in 2019, “but with the bodily movement that produces a specific sound, gesture, or sonic fragment.”
Saunders said she thought of “Lash” as “a kind of lovemaking” between ideas about the body, death, love and sexuality. All four are omnipresent in the piece, in which the morbid flirts with the lofty and the erotic. The invitation to “come to bed and die” is sung as a hushed a cappella quartet.
In the third act, instruments spread out throughout the Deutsche Oper auditorium. In a recent rehearsal, that created a surround-sound effect. It was like being trapped inside another person’s head. The sounds — rough, smooth and achingly melodic — seemed to press against the skull from around the hall. The quiet after a final quartet held a kind of loss.
“The magic of music is that it’s transitory,” Saunders said. “It’s always just dying. It’s living and dying in one breath.”
The post In a Passionate Composer’s First Opera, Sex Flirts With Death appeared first on New York Times.
