Ana Moura
The Book of Disquiet is to receive its first Greek performances on 15 and 16 December, at the Onassis Cultural Centre in Athens. Making use of a new Greek translation by Annie Spyrakou, the opera will feature the actor Miltiadis Fiorentzis, and the Greek contemporary music group Ergon Ensemble, conducted by Kasper de Roo.
A cutting-edge integration of music, live action and video, The Book of Disquiet is built from text fragments by the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa. In his work, Pessoa often cast himself in a series of distinct characters, or ‘heteronyms’, portrayed as multiple personalities on the video and soundtrack of Van der Aa’s work. His ‘Book of Disquiet’ was a posthumously reconstructed autobiography of the alter ego Bernando Soares, described as a ‘mutilation’ of Pessoa’s own personality – an obsessive cataloguer of anecdotes, dreams and moods that gradually push him closer to the nature of the self.
Van der Aa’s third piece of music theatre, premiered in 2009, is also one of his most widely performed. Last season it was staged in London and New York, receiving strong reviews in both cities. In his 5-star review for The Times in London, Richard Morrison described how Pessoa’s ‘manic intensity beneath a seemingly static surface is wonderfully explored in Van der Aa’s score’, while the New York Times’s James R. Ostreich found it ‘memorable … imaginative … riveting’.
Tickets and more information may be found here.
