Morgen und Abend, Royal Opera House

Over the past few years, one contemporary European composer has managed to become a fixture on the English stage: the eminently serious Georg Friedrich Haas. In vain, an impassioned protest against the rise of the far right in Haas’ native Austria, lit up the Southbank Centre's Queen Elizabeth Hall in 2013. More recently, Claire Booth sung the subtle, Sappho-based song cycle Atthis in Covent Garden’s Linbury Studio, accompanied by a dance performance of Haas’ String Quartet No. 2. Now, the spectralist maestro is bringing his ever-shifting tapestries of sound to the Royal Opera House’s main stage, with the specifically commissioned Morgen und Abend.

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The synopsis – tracking a man’s birth, his life as a fisherman, conversations with deceased loved ones and final revelation that he is himself dead – might sound uncompromisingly minimal and unpromisingly vague, but two superb collaborators suggest great things might be afoot. The ever experimental Graham Vick, Birmingham Opera Company founder and an internationally successful director, will helm the production.
And the libretto comes courtesy of Jon Fosse (Melancholy), one of Norway’s finest writer's and the most performed living playwright in the world. His novel Morgon og kveld, which will be published in English by Dalkey Archive to correspond with this production, has been described as a mesmerising evocation of a single life, burning with Biblical prose and moments of quiet beauty. It seems the perfect fit for Haas’ soundscapes, which often ebb and flow like our perception of the passage of time.
The cast, too, promises to be extraordinary, though largely unfamiliar to the Anglophone public. Klaus Maria Brandauer, who stars as Olai, is an actor, film director and academic, best known outside Austria for scooping a Golden Globe award for Out of Africa. Michael Boder (Le Grand Macabre), renowned for imbuing contemporary music with a chromatic vitality, will conduct.
This might not be a crowd-pleaser, but for those in the know it could offer one of the defining cultural experiences of 2015.