Up-close

Written for Argentinian cellist Sol Gabetta, this hauntingly beautiful work is among Van der Aa’s finest. Gabetta, in a print frock, sits among the black-clad orchestra, spinning out a rapturous song without words, while on screen a similarly dressed older woman creeps furtively to a disused house to use an old, unspecified piece of electronic equipment.

Black-out screens cover the windows and the machine communicates in code. The woman may be reliving wartime memories, possibly as a member of the Dutch resistance. But we will never know for certain. Being “up-close” can never give us the bigger picture, and we are left with a mystery that continues to resonate after the music has faded.
— The Guardian, 21.03.2011, Tim Ashley

Et on imagine difficilement meilleure soliste que la jeune violoncelliste argentine Sol Gabetta pour cet “Up Close” associant la musique instrumentale – brillante, sensuelle, virtuose -, les sons électro-acoustiques et le cinéma – la narration, par touches, d’une aventure parallèle, vécue par une autre Sol Gabetta, âgée, errante et toujours aussi belle, jouée par Vakil Eelman.

Van der Aa, évoluant dans son temps propre à travers une narration particulière, fragmentée et captivante.
— La Libre, 16.03.2011, Martine D. Mergeay

Enervating music in a world-class performance, 30 minutes of total suspense. Simultaneously, the soloist’s alter ego, in a disturbing video projection, is on the brink of madness. The audience can see the perspective of the ageing artist interacting with the real stage action.
A most interesting and enthralling approach, purposeful and skilled, visually and musically impressive..
— Volksfreund, 13.03.2011, Dirk Tenbrock

Up-close has superb ideas, such as a magical woods scene in which the trees are draped in rustling scraps of aluminium foil. Cellist Gabetta has an impressive role, not least as a soloist but also as an actress. Film, music and acting often merge impressively, but despite that it remains on the whole a cello concerto, with explosive moments as well as melancholy lyricism. At the end the Luxembourg audience keeps clapping. “Now we really know Van der Aa,” says a well turned-out woman to her husband.
— NRC, 14-03-2011, Jochem Valkenburg

Michel van der Aa has invented a form of music theatre that works wonderfully because he is not rooted in traditional opera theatre, but rather combines film and snatches from evocative art videos with music. ‘Up-close’ deals with fundamental human loneliness, telling it entirely in tautly stylised images in which an elderly woman performs ritual acts that do not literally specify anything, but in their successive projection on the screen create a reality that evokes the sensation of watching your own nightmare. Van der Aa unerringly envisages images and actions, arousing associations that make painfully clear that we are all locked up very much alone in our own little self.
Image and music are woven into a coherent whole in a perfectly timed, tightly directed play of varied repetitions. Its powerful charge derives from the fact that it is all structured so unsentimentally and in an abstractly musical way. What you see and hear interlocks secretively and with success because ultimately it is all put together with an imagination that is purely musical. It works because Van der Aa is an unequalled master at creating a high-tech whole from barely profiled gestures, which gets its meaning from the interconnection of all these elements. It makes for a very contemporary form of intelligent but nevertheless accessible music theatre.
— Parool, 18-03-2011, Roeland Hazendonk

A fearful woman in the film, who by the look of it is doing meaningless work in an abandoned house in the woods, soon merges with the Sol Gabetta, the Argentinean cellist playing on the stage who represents the woman in her younger years. Film and live images intermingle poetically, and Van der Aa’s wonderful music does the rest. Van der Aa retains all the elements of concerto form, but has the piece begin with the solo cadenza, in a magnificent performance by the lithe-limbed Gabetta. When music, electronics and string orchestra then suddenly converge, the magic that you so often hear in Van der Aa’s music is there again. A fine addition.
— Trouw, 18-03-2011, Peter van der Lint

Sol Gabetta and the Amsterdam Sinfonietta played the evocative, lyrical score, which made atmospheric use of electronics, at one side of the stage. On the other, a silent film of an older woman running through woods to an empty house offered a puzzling narrative. Gabetta and woman at times echoed each other. Eventually they find the same old-fashioned standard lamp and, as it were, everything is illuminated.

It was a richly intriguing affair. My inability precisely to say how Up-Close’s recipe of resonance and mystery worked is itself a form of praise.
—The Observer, Fiona Maddocks, 27.03.2010

On film we see an elderly woman wandering across a stage devoid of musicians, while soloist Sol Gabetta performs live to one side: the music (and movement in moments) sometimes separate, sometimes interacting with the film. Gabetta tackles the score and its often riveting urgency with a drama that becomes as much physical as musical, an effect enhanced by her integration into the direction of the entire piece. It is a striking visual effect that lingers longest: Gabetta leaping up, propelled forward, in unison with the actor on screen. I think Up-close would benefit from being even more so, a greater proximity creating an even stronger sense of absorption into this unsettlingly strange stage world of broken barriers and inverted norms.
— Gramophone, 30.03.2011, Martin Cullingford

Here is no avant-gardist who mercilessly frightens off his audience, no esoteric metaphysician, no gushing neo-Romantic. Instead, here we have a powerful seeker on a quest for the meaning of life who combines austere sounds with a preference for whip cracking rhythms and dense tonal atmosphere. […]
In van der Aa’s music, any kind of mood is tersely and grippingly translated into sounds with an underlying, entirely unsentimental sense of melancholy. It is this austere kind of melancholy that can be found, for example, at the beginning of “Up-Close”, when Sol Gabetta plays a solo cadenza, at first tentatively, then frequently interrupted. Again and again the music presses forth from lower tonal areas up into higher registers, culminating in a virtuoso maenad dance that is taken up by Amsterdam Sinfonietta in a furious manner … the first movement leads into a mysteriously dreamy intermezzo for tape music and video in which the cellist gets into contact with her alter ego on the canvas for the first time. Both seem to be striving for a cross-generational dialogue, not knowing how to begin and how to carry on … A touching combination of film and live performance, of past and present..
— Süddeutsche Zeitung, 19.03.2011, Reinhard Brembeck

Van der Aa had his protagonist appear in two forms: with the jagged tonal language of her solo part, the cellist, Sol Gabetta, illustrated the surreal predicament of an old woman which was simultaneously shown in a video. Every noise, whether from the speakers or the orchestra, heightened the tension: an exciting, complex dialogue between film, electronics and live music.
— Hamburger Abendblatt, 22.03.2011, Verena Fischer-Zernin