Frank Nuyts - Middle East/Barber - Knoxville, Summer of 1915

I went to the Vlaamse Opera in Gent yesterday to attend a performance of a new work by Frank Nuyts. Nuyts is a percussionist and composer who teaches at the Hogeschool in Gent. He has a reputation for being an interesting, prolific and eclectic composer.  I had never heard any of his works before, however. This was the second performance of his 'chamber opera' Middle-East (the premiere was on Thursday), a collaboration with writer Philippe Blasband for the libretto and director Johan Dehollander for the staging. Rather than an opera I would call the work a 'scena'. It's a one hour work, without breaks. The vocal score is almost exclusively given to a single soprano who sings both Barak's and Arafat's parts which are often indistinguishable. And there is no real action or dramatic development at the heart of the piece. The work revolves around the failed Camp David talks in 2000 between Ehud Barak and Yasser Arafat. It's about the impossibility of these two protagonists to establish a genuine communication as they remain enclosed in their ideological and linguistic cocoons. All this leads me to consider Middle East as an extended meditation on a situation, or a predicament. It's a little more complicated as there is also an actor involved, who messes around on the scene and also sings a few lines. In addition text and some images are projected. So, all in all it's a complicated challenge for the listener.

I was primarily interested in the music. It seems Nuyts has made quite a journey from his post-serial beginnings. I was surprised how accessible and atmospheric ('stemmig') the music was. It's unabashedly tonal, not even particularly dissonant or dense. It doesn't try to show off with pyrotechnics either. So it struck me as eminently listenable and approachable. The French refer to a wine that is well made and pleases the amateur not with depth, terroir and complexity but with feminine grace and voluptuous fruitiness a 'vin flatteur'. In that sense we could consider Nuyts' score as 'flattering' too. Likely this has been the composer's intention as he discusses in the programme brochure. For him this work is not about conflict but about beauty. Indeed, Blasband's libretto summons the heady perfumes of a youth spent - by both protagonists - in mysterious Jerusalem, the eternal city. It is their experience of the beauty of the city and surrounding Palestine that explains a lot about the intransigency of their positions. Nuyts: "Hence, some sort of sweetness percolates through the music which hangs as a cloud above the negotiation table". Stylistically I couldn't detect obvious fingerprints of other composers, apart from an occasional nod to American minimalism and a hint of Copland. However, the one piece that came to my mind whilst listening to Middle East was Barber's Knoxville, Summer of 1915. The idiom and setting are different, to be sure, but Barber's mellifluous soliloquy for soprano is also steeped in this kind sweetness (without becoming saccharine, however). Today I listened to the excellent version sung by Dawn Upshaw and supported by Zinman's St. Luke's Orchestra (on a Nonesuch disc) and I still think there is a certain correspondence between the two works. Still, I think I would have liked a little more counterpoint and 'durchkomponiertes' fabric in Nuyts' score.

That being said, I thougth the performance itself by the Spectra Ensemble (piano, quartet, percussionist, flute, clarinet) was not very commendable. This may be due to a combination of factors. As it was only the second performance, they likely need to grow into the music. Furthermore, the ensemble was placed in the back, fairly removed from the audience. And the persistent hum of the projectors didn't help in clearly and forcefully presenting the music. Altogether, I thought the ensemble sounded too tentative and did not bring enough conviction to the score.

I am not at all sure about what to make of the work as a whole. For me it is very much a question of 'prima la musica, poi le parole'. When I listen to an opera - which I'm not doing very often - I'm listening to absolute music. Mostly I don't even bother with the libretto. Strangely, whilst in my professional life I'm always struggling with conceptual and social complexity, in music I seem to avoid it. When listening to music I'm interested in structural, architectural complexity, in the intricacies of 'tönend bewegte Formen'. It's similar to photography, where mostly I'm interested in the pictures as pictures, not in the often flaccid stories behind them. So, whilst this Arafat-Barak conundrum interests me from a professional point of view, I'm having difficulties in making the transition from the world of sounds to the world of ideas, and vice versa.

The work is scheduled for performance in Stuk Leuven later this year and I will certainly try to go there for a second audition.