Sunken Garden
On 21 October the NTR ZaterdagMatinee will host the first performance of the semi-staged version of Van der Aa’s fourth opera, Sunken Garden at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam. A re-imagining of the work, based on its second version made for Opéra de Lyon in 2015, it will be then taken to the Essen Philharmonie on 29 October before a new staging and its US premiere at the Dallas Opera in March 2018. For the October performances, the singers Roderick Williams, Katherine Manley and Claron McFadden will be supported by the Amsterdam Sinfonietta, conducted by André de Ridder. In Dallas, the Dallas Opera Orchestra will be conducted by Nicole Paiement, and Williams, Manley and Miah Persson will star.
Sunken Garden connects the disappearances of a software engineer and a glamorous young socialite, with a neurotic film-maker of dubious credentials and a gullible patroness of the arts. An occult-mystery film-opera with a libretto by British novelist David Mitchell, it deals in bright hoax and dark truth, in patronage and manipulation, in the virtual and the bodily, in the isolation of the broadband age, and in the primal impulse to cheat mortality at any cost. Previous performances of the opera have been given, to acclaim, at London’s Barbican, the Amsterdam Holland Festival and Opéra de Lyon.
