{"id":6766,"date":"2017-05-03T16:12:08","date_gmt":"2017-05-03T23:12:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/classicalguitarmagazine.com\/?p=6766"},"modified":"2017-05-03T14:12:49","modified_gmt":"2017-05-03T21:12:49","slug":"michael-kudirka-brings-guitar-to-a-bold-and-strange-opera-based-on-luis-bunuels-the-exterminating-angel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/classicalguitarmagazine.com\/michael-kudirka-brings-guitar-to-a-bold-and-strange-opera-based-on-luis-bunuels-the-exterminating-angel\/","title":{"rendered":"Michael Kudirka Brings Guitar to a Bold and Strange Opera Based on Luis Bu\u00f1uel\u2019s \u2018The Exterminating Angel\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"<h6>From the Spring 2017 issue of <em>Classical Guitar<\/em> | BY BLAIR JACKSON<\/h6>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s1\">Y<\/span><span class=\"s1\">ou never know what kind of stories will be turned into operas. Aside from the fantastical plots of many classic operas (Bible stories, Greek and Norse mythology, fairy tales!), the modern era has given us such unlikely story sources as the life of Gandhi (<i>Satyagraha<\/i>), the murder of a gay city supervisor in San Francisco (<i>Harvey Milk<\/i>), A-bomb pioneer Robert Oppenheimer (<i>Dr. Atomic<\/i>), and Russia\u2019s infamous \u201cMad Monk\u201d (<i>Rasputin<\/i>), to name just a few. Still, few would have predicted that one of the opera sensations of 2016 would be an adaptation of Spanish surrealist director Luis Bu\u00f1uel\u2019s darkly satirical 1962 film <i>The Exterminating Angel<\/i> (<i>El \u00e1ngel exterminador<\/i>). It\u2019s about a lavish dinner party in a mansion that turns unsettlingly, then horrifically, strange when the well-heeled guests find they are psychologically unable to leave the house. Over the course of a few days, many bleak shadings of the human soul are revealed, including guilt, greed, paranoia, murderous inclinations, and more. Not exactly <i>opera bouffe<\/i> material (though it does have sharply humorous moments).<\/span><\/p>\n<p><iframe src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/uEyy1wsl1eY?rel=0\" width=\"750\" height=\"422\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p class=\"p3\"><span class=\"s1\">The opera of <i>The Exterminating Angel<\/i>, which premiered to rave reviews in the summer of 2016 at the Salzburg Music Festival in Austria, is a three-act work, with music by acclaimed British composer, conductor, and pianist Thomas Ad\u00e8s, and text by Tom Cairns in collaboration with Ad\u00e8s, based on the original film script by Bu\u00f1uel and Luis Alcoriza. Ad\u00e8s has written two previous operas, as well as numerous orchestral works, chamber pieces, choral compositions, and more. Though often working in decidedly modern idioms, Ad\u00e8s also draws inspiration from past masters; he is a true eclectic. This approach is evident in his score for <i>The Exterminating Angel<\/i>, which traverses a wide range of old and modern styles\u2014and even includes a five-minute sequence dominated by classical guitar! <\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p3\"><span class=\"s1\">To consult on and polish that guitar part, which plays under a bizarre third-act scene in which a (projected) disembodied hand creeps across the stage to strangle one of the party guests, Ad\u00e8s enlisted the help of Michael Kudirka, who for many years has been a leading proponent of new directions in classical-guitar music. Not only did Kudirka help shape the part, he played it for the Salzburg performances of the opera, and will reprise that role this spring when <i>The Exterminating Angel<\/i> has its London debut at Covent Garden (April 24\u2013May 8), and then moves to the U.S. for a number of performances at the Metropolitan Opera in New York (October 26\u2013November 24). <\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p3\"><span class=\"s1\">On the phone from Wisconsin, where he currently lives with his wife, flautist Tara Schwab (an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin, Stevens Point; they play together as Duo Amantis), Kudirka filled us in on his involvement with the project, which dates back several years, when he was still based in Los Angeles. \u201cAd\u00e8s usually spends about half the year in London and the other half in Los Angeles, and we were introduced in L.A. by our mutual friend, composer Veronika Krausas. After hearing me perform Hans Werner Henze\u2019s <i>Royal Winter Music<\/i> as a part of Krausas\u2019 chamber opera <i>Mad Lady Macbeth, <\/i>he would occasionally show up at my performances: He heard a couple of solo programs, and he also saw me play some early music on theorbo and viola da gamba.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p3\"><span class=\"s1\">\u201cAfter he\u2019d heard me in all these different situations, we ran into each other at a dinner party and I popped the question to him: \u2018Have you ever considered writing any guitar music?\u2019 That\u2019s a question I feel compelled to ask any time I meet a composer of that stature,\u201d Kudirka adds with a laugh. \u201cHe answered that he\u2019d love to, but he\u2019s a pianist and he said he was a bit intimidated by how idiosyncratic the guitar is, but that he\u2019d think about it. <\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p3\"><span class=\"s1\">\u201cA couple of years passed, we stayed in touch, and he saw me a couple of more times in L.A., even after I\u2019d moved to Wisconsin. Then, last February, I was doing a series of performance residencies [in southern California] at Chapman University, USC, and CalArts, and he said, \u2018Hey, as long as you\u2019re in town, how about if you come by my house in L.A. I\u2019ve got this little guitar aria in the middle of my new opera. Help me work on it.\u2019 So I went over there and we went through it one note and one chord at a time. His notation was very pianistic, especially in his approach to articulation, so we found certain timbres and techniques such as <i>tambora<\/i> and different kinds of <i>rasgueado<\/i> strumming to help give a wider palette to some of the accented notes. I wanted to change as little of what he wrote as possible, but there were a few harmonies where there were dense tone clusters you can do really easily on the piano\u2014these really tight intervals\u2014I\u2019d say, \u2018I can get that one or that one [on guitar], but I can\u2019t get all of them.\u2019 So it was a matter of little bits of omission. I\u2019ll be honest with you\u2014these five minutes of guitar music are ridiculously difficult, but that\u2019s the way he writes for everybody! I made a great effort <i>not<\/i> to tell him all the things that were inconvenient; just the things that were<br \/>\nimpossible.<\/span><\/p>\n<figure id=\"attachment_6774\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-6774\" style=\"width: 750px\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\"><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-6774\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/classicalguitarmagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/04\/Classical-Guitar-Opera-Luis-Bunuel-Bear-Stage.png?resize=750%2C500\" alt=\"\" width=\"750\" height=\"500\" srcset=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/classicalguitarmagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/04\/Classical-Guitar-Opera-Luis-Bunuel-Bear-Stage.png?w=750&amp;ssl=1 750w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/classicalguitarmagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/04\/Classical-Guitar-Opera-Luis-Bunuel-Bear-Stage.png?resize=300%2C200&amp;ssl=1 300w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/classicalguitarmagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/04\/Classical-Guitar-Opera-Luis-Bunuel-Bear-Stage.png?resize=360%2C240&amp;ssl=1 360w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 750px) 100vw, 750px\" \/><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-6774\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">\u00a9 Salzburger Festspiele \/ Monika Rittershaus<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p class=\"p3\"><span class=\"s1\">\u201cSo after we got through everything he said, \u2018This is great\u2014I\u2019d love to have you play it as well. Let me talk to people at the Salzburg Festspiele,\u2019 where it was going to be premiered. About a month later, I got an email from them saying they\u2019d like me to come over and do it. We did a few days of rehearsal in Vienna and then moved over to Salzburg.\u201d <\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p3\"><span class=\"s1\">The musical passage in question scores what could be a dream or hallucination; it begins with nearly a minute of solo guitar, then accompanies a mezzo soprano (played at the premiere by the incomparable Anne Sofie von Otter) for an aria. \u201cAt the end of the aria,\u201d Kudirka says, \u201cthe Ondes Martinot\u2014that great early electronic instrument [invented in the late 1920s]\u2014comes in with this deep, spooky bassline from the keyboard, and these really creepy Theremin-like gliding lines. That instrument sort of represents the malevolent nature of the room that they\u2019re stuck in. At the very end, the guitar does a huge slow glissando with a <i>rasgueado<\/i> tremolo going on all the way from the first fret up to the bridge, as the hand is actually crawling up the character\u2019s body to strangle her. Tubular bells chime three times, and at the moment my left-hand fingers are just half an inch from the bridge, with my right-hand fingers doing a tremolo on the shortest imaginable string\u2014at the peak of this glissando\u2014Ad\u00e8s cues the entire orchestra to come in with an absolutely devastating cacophony. It\u2019s fantastic!<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p3\"><span class=\"s1\">\u201cOne of the reasons Thomas Ad\u00e8s is such a successful composer,\u201d Kudirka continues, \u201cis that he has the ability to write music that seems oddly familiar, partly because he is able to draw inspiration from the whole history of Western music and reimagine it in new contexts. In this opera, there are elements that are Wagnerian, and others that sound like you\u2019re listening to Francois Couperin\u2019s harpsichord music, and other moments like this grizzly parody of Johann Sebastian Bach\u2019s <i>Sheep May Safely Graze<\/i> done in this sort of sinister reimagining\u2014as sheep are being led to the slaughter! And of course he\u2019s more than willing to push into unfamiliar territory. The musical styles in the opera are so diverse, there will be moments that some will find incredibly harsh; it can be a real assault on the senses. But there are also moments that are absolutely sublime\u2014just the most beautiful, luscious sounds that make you think, \u2018I want to die listening to this music!\u2019\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<figure id=\"attachment_6771\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-6771\" style=\"width: 750px\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\"><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-6771\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/classicalguitarmagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/04\/Classical-Guitar-Opera-Luis-Bunuel-Thomas-Ades.png?resize=750%2C500\" alt=\"\" width=\"750\" height=\"500\" srcset=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/classicalguitarmagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/04\/Classical-Guitar-Opera-Luis-Bunuel-Thomas-Ades.png?w=750&amp;ssl=1 750w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/classicalguitarmagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/04\/Classical-Guitar-Opera-Luis-Bunuel-Thomas-Ades.png?resize=300%2C200&amp;ssl=1 300w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/classicalguitarmagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/04\/Classical-Guitar-Opera-Luis-Bunuel-Thomas-Ades.png?resize=360%2C240&amp;ssl=1 360w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 750px) 100vw, 750px\" \/><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-6771\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Thomas Ad\u00e8s. Brian Voce Photo<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p class=\"p3\"><span class=\"s1\">Of course, working on <i>The Exterminating Angel<\/i> has just been a small slice of what the always-busy Kudirka has been up to lately. The guitarist and educator, who received both his bachelor\u2019s and doctoral degrees from USC\u2019s Thornton School of Music, and his master\u2019s from the California Institute of the Arts, has always had one foot in classical guitar tradition and the other<br \/>\nin cutting-edge modernity. For instance, the well-regarded (but now defunct) ensemble he founded, the Helios Guitar Quartet, played Kudirka\u2019s four-guitar arrangement of the first book of Bach\u2019s <i>Well\u2013Tempered Clavier<\/i>, but also contemporary works by Ian Krouse, Brian Head, and others. As a solo performer and in his guitar duo with Eric Benzant-Feldra he has championed disparate modern composers such as Jeffrey Holmes, Dusan Bogdanovic, Miroslav Tadic (with whom he studied at CalArts), Chinary Ung, and many more.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p3\"><span class=\"s1\">But much of his recent focus has been on Duo Amantis with Tara Schwab, which has a repertoire spanning Giuliani to Ravel to Piazzolla to some of the aforementioned modernists. The pair\u2019s forthcoming CD on Doberman-Yppan\u2019s label, which Kudirka hopes will be out by summer, will focus primarily on 21st century pieces by Bogdanovic, Tadic, Holmes, Ourkouzounov, and others, eschewing some of the more \u201cpopular\u201d pieces they often play live.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p3\"><span class=\"s1\">\u201cOur feeling about recording,\u201d Kudirka offers, \u201cis that pieces like Piazzolla\u2019s [<i>History of the Tango<\/i>] or Takamitsu\u2019s <i>Toward the Sea<\/i> have been recorded so many times already, yet there are many exceptional compositions that have never been recorded at all, or only once. It\u2019s a little tricky sometimes to carve out the area we want to live in with new music, because there is such a wide range of aesthetic sensibility with quite a bit of tribalism between camps. Ironically, I wouldn\u2019t even consider myself or my flute-and-guitar duo to be a part of the die-hard new music scene. There are festivals out there that would not accept what we do because it\u2019s far too accessible\u2014and others that think we\u2019re entirely too avant-garde! In the end, though, this doesn\u2019t bother me because my guiding principle has always been that I will always commit myself to sharing the work of truly great composers of any time, including our own, and it doesn\u2019t matter if it\u2019s Francesco da Milano or Jeffrey Holmes\u2026 or Thomas Ad\u00e8s.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>From the Spring 2017 issue of Classical Guitar | BY BLAIR JACKSON You never know what kind of stories will be turned into operas. Aside from the fantastical plots of many classic operas (Bible stories, Greek and Norse mythology, fairy tales!), the modern era has given us such unlikely story sources as the life of Gandhi (Satyagraha), the murder of a gay city supervisor in San Francisco (Harvey Milk), A-bomb pioneer Robert Oppenheimer (Dr. Atomic), and Russia\u2019s infamous \u201cMad Monk\u201d [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":6770,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6766","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-stories"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/classicalguitarmagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/04\/Classical-Guitar-Opera-Luis-Bunuel-Thomas-Ades-Michael-Kudrika.png?fit=750%2C500&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/classicalguitarmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6766","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/classicalguitarmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/classicalguitarmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/classicalguitarmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/classicalguitarmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6766"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/classicalguitarmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6766\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/classicalguitarmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6770"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/classicalguitarmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6766"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/classicalguitarmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6766"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/classicalguitarmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6766"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}