Source: Bloomberg
Those are the simple and fairly incontrovertible messages that a new multimedia opera called “Amazonas,” currently playing in Munich, takes 3 1/2 hours to convey.
“Amazonas” is the biggest project at this year’s Munich Biennial Festival for New Music Theater, led by Peter Ruzicka, the former director of the Salzburg Festival. It’s an ecologically correct performance that would be more effective if it were much shorter.
The production is divided into three parts, each by a different composer. Many in the audience didn’t even stick around for the end of the first part -- the weakest.
Three singers, standing behind large screens on which their faces are projected in close-up, quote feverishly from Walter Raleigh’s 1595 expedition report on his search for El Dorado. It’s a longwinded way of making the point that the western world set out to plunder the Amazon in a blind search for riches, unable to see the wealth of nature already there.
Klaus Schedl’s music is painful -- it sounds like the breaks between songs at a rock concert, with distortion, screeches, random percussion and lots of decibels. As an art installation that you could walk out of after a few minutes, this might work. Torturing a captive audience is unfair.
Forest Stroll
For part two, the stage takes over the whole of the center of the room, transformed into a rainforest with the use of gauze curtains, projections and lights. The Brazilian composer Tato Taborda’s score combines elements of traditional indigenous music with the sounds of forest creatures and hints of imminent destruction: The buzz of a helicopter, Christian missionary songs.
The audience is invited to take a walk through the forest. The seats at Munich’s Reithalle were hard, so a chance to stretch your legs was welcome. Again, as an art installation this could keep you entertained for 10 minutes. There was little development and not enough substance to make it worth an hour.
The last part was the most visually exciting, with a stage made up of square and rectangular blocks that can each be individually programmed with projections. The music, also electronic and this time by Ludger Bruemmer, aims to replicate the sounds of molecular movements. (It wasn’t clear whether anyone knows what molecules moving actually sound like.)
Political Science
Uninspiringly titled “In expectation of the efficiency of a rational method for a solution to the problem of climate change,” it’s part science lesson about the greenhouse effect, part political debate about the future of the Amazon.
It all ends with projections as the choir sings: “The death of the Amazon is the death of mankind” or “Market capitalism is true terrorism.”
A Greenpeace leaflet would be more informative and balanced.
Yet there was no shortage of sponsors who thought this was a worthwhile idea. “Amazonas,” which took four years of international collaboration, garnered funding from the German government, the European Union, Deutsche Bank AG, Petroleo Brasileiro SA and the Goethe Institute.