LOUIS ANDRIESSEN

Writing to Vermeer

Peter Greenaway
 

Susan Narucki - soprano, Barbara Hannigan - soprano, Susan Bickley - mezzo-soprano

De Nederlandse Opera, Schönberg Ensemble and Aska Ensemble / Reinbert de Leeuw

 

‘The music conjures a luminous intensity, as if Andriessen had transformed the magical light in Vermeer’s paintings into music.’  Guardian

 

Louis Andriessen is the most highly regarded contemporary composer working in the Netherlands today, an influential and iconoclastic figure whose work has been presented on stages throughout the world.  Vermeer is Andriessen’s second collaboration with filmmaker-conceptual artist-provocateur Peter Greenaway (The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, Her Lover) as librettist and director.  This multimedia opera contrasts the alluring stillness and warm glow of the domestic scenes painted by Dutch master Johannes Vermeer with the clangorous political, social and economic turmoil of the encroaching outside world during the late 1700s.

 

Premiered to critical acclaim in Amsterdam in 1999, the ambitious piece has been subsequently performed at Australia’s Adelaide Festival and the Lincoln Center Festival in New York City.  In a four-star review of its Dutch engagement, in Billboard, columnist Bradley Bamberger remarked, ‘The mixture of poetic speculation, tragic Dutch history, and Vermeer’s sweetly haunting pictures is deeply touching, and Andriessen’s rich, humane score makes for the ideal emotional agent.’  Andriessen himself, who is best known for his earlier, rigorously minimalist pieces, has said, “Like all Dutch kids, I grew up with Vermeer’s images; the music is serene because of the serenity in those pictures, which I love.  The ideal was to create music that somehow approached the beauty of those paintings.”  

 

A work of imagination grounded in historical reality.  Greenaway invented a series of 18 letters to Vermeer, who has departed his native Delft for two weeks in the Hague.  Their contents, revealing a longing for Vermeer’s swift return, are sung by the painter’s pregnant wife Catherine (Susan Narucki), his mother-in law Maria (Kathyrn Harries) and a third, fictitious character, an artist’s model named Saskia (Barbara Hannigan).  No male voices are employed and Vermeer himself is never seen.  The fact-based visual imagery that Greenaway and co-director Saskia Boddeke assembled is meant to shock the audience and upend the seeming complacency of the household.  An explosion almost levels Delft, the Tulip market crashes and devastates the Dutch economy, the French attempt to invade and the Dutch flood their own country, thwarting their enemies while ruining their land. On stage, the opera culminates in an actual waterfall drenching the performers.  On record, these moments of violence are marked by interludes of jarring electronic score from young composer Michel van der Aa.

 

This compelling piece arrives on CD at a moment in America that lends Andriessen’s work even greater resonance - a time of floods, economic uncertainty, and war.

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