Dutch National Opera, named as opera company of the year at last month’s international opera awards, is on a high at the moment. At its inaugural Opera Forward festival in March, it premiered new works by Michel van der Aa and Kaija Saariaho. The company’s contributions to this month’s Holland festival, meanwhile, are not only the world stage premiere of Louis Andriessen’s latest theatre piece, but also an outstanding new production of Tchaikovsky’s Queen of Spades, the latter directed with exceptional intelligence by Stefan Herheim and conducted by Mariss Jansons.
Andriessen describes Theatre of the World, first performed in concert by the Los Angeles Philharmonic last month, as a “grotesque in nine scenes”. Helmut Krausser’s libretto is built around the life of Athanasius Kircher, a 17th-century German Jesuit scholar and polymath, and one of those historical figures who was described as the last man to know everything – even though after his death his writings and theories on a huge range of cultural and scientific subjects were derided by the leaders of the Enlightenment.
Theatre of the World takes the ageing Kircher on a surreal journey through a Bosch-like world that’s part heaven, part hell. He is guided by a boy who may be an angel, or perhaps a junior devil, or even the reincarnation of the young Kircher himself. The intellectual achievements of the scholar’s life are reviewed; and his encounters with his publisher Janssonius and Pope Innocent XI are revisited, as are his long-distance exchanges with the Mexican nun and poet Sister Juana Inés de la Cruz – in whom the celibate Kircher appears to have discovered a like mind.
Perhaps it’s a morality tale of sorts. However, Pierre Audi’s staging (with designs and strangely incoherent video by the Quay Brothers) is cluttered and busy, and doesn’t make an already tangled narrative any easier to follow. But the intensely committed performances – from Leigh Melrose as Kircher, Lindsay Kesselman as the Boy, Marcel Beekman as the pope and Cristina Zavalloni as Juana Inés, with Reinbert de Leeuw conducting Asko|Schönberg – make every detail of Andriessen’s fabulously assured score count. His pungent reedy soundworld is darker than usual, but its striding, jazzy ostinatos, sweet-sour chorales and early music vocal writing, as well as the lightning-quick references to a range of other musiccal styles, are as instantly identifiable and exhilarating as ever.
• At Carré, Amsterdam, on 17 and 19 June. Holland festival continues until 3 July.
