Amopera at the Wiener Konzerthaus | Review

The 'dystopian ballad' by Klangforum Wien and Needcompany is a multimedia meta-opera exploring love through the medium of 20th and 21st-century works

When one thinks of the musical – or, specifically, the operatic – landscape of Vienna, we think of lavish productions housed in the imposing Wiener Staatsoper, all very much confined within the centuries-wide shadow of the Austrian capital’s rich cultural heritage. So, when I was presented with Klangforum Wien’s Amopera – subtitled a dystopian ballad – I experienced an experimental and subversive insight into what opera can be in today's world.

A self-professed ‘meta-opera’, Amopera is, in short, a multi-media Gesamtkunstwerk taken to a whole new level with interpretive dance and art projections on top of the musical offerings. Its title refers to the core propellant of the work, amo – i.e., love – and its many, many facets. Based on the book Liebesverrat (Betrayed Love) by Swiss philologist Peter von Matt, the opera dissects whether love exists as a social construct, eternally moulded by the ebb and flow of society, or as a fundamental element of humanity. It achieves this by distilling love down to various base emotions, such as fear, anger, and lust, across 16 musical numbers. These are all taken from various operatic and vocal works written in the 20th and 21st centuries, ranging from Berg and Berio to Maxwell Davies and Britten.

[for the full article, visit www.gramophone.co.uk]