Collaborations and world premieres at the Opera Forward Festival in Amsterdam

Opera has long been crying out for new audiences. Few houses are innovating with the imagination of Dutch National Opera, whose Opera Forward Festival last week played host to a flurry of ground-breaking collaborations, important industry discussions, and world premieres of two new commissions for the main house. While both works – Philip Venables’ We Are The Lucky Ones and Bushra El-Turk’s Oum: A Son’s Quest For His Mother – address nostalgia and memory, albeit in very different ways, they speak individually to what have traditionally been two separate audiences: the audience within the opera house and the one without.

We Are the Lucky Ones, the latest ‘Phil & Ted’ collaboration – this time with the help of playwright Nina Segal – is a triumphant collective chronicle of Europe’s postwar generation (full review here). With a libretto crafted from dozens of interviews carried out across the continent and a score bulging with reference to the 20th century’s most significant musical innovations – Hollywood film, jazz, dance and popular classics, in short, the music of the baby-boomers – Venables’ opera is a dazzling dance through time. His previous stagework The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions played to great acclaim at last year’s Holland Festival, a factor which might well have accounted for the large, exuberant group in biker leathers posing for photographs in the foyer before taking their seats in the auditorium. Would they have turned out for another Rosenkavalier? Perhaps not.

In an impressively longitudinal approach to audience engagement that began with last year’s Radio Cairo, a weekend of events, games, food stalls, music and poetry, with Amsterdam’s North African and Middle Eastern communities at its heart, DNO brokered a collaboration with the city’s Meervaart Theatre, the Amsterdam Andalusian Orchestra and the British-Lebanese composer Bushra El-Turk inspired by the Egyptian megastar, the singer Oum Kalthoum. “Her music is everywhere in the city,” explained Yassine Boussaid in a programme of contextualising music and poetry to attune those ears more used to Strauss and Handel. “She is the music of our parents’ generation.” To give some idea of her popularity, when ‘Egypt’s Fourth Pyramid’ released her first record in 1928, she sold half a million copies and when she died, it is estimated that four million people turned out to pay their respects. Opera Forward falls during Ramadan and, in what must have been a first for any European Opera House, the audience waited as the sky over the canal turned pink and orange in the sunset and, as darkness fell, prayed and broke fast together.

Oum Kalthoum’s performances were not ‘songs’ as a western tradition would understand them, more the sort of journey of a novel: a couple of songs could weave poetry and music over three or four hours. So Oum, A Son’s Quest for his Mother, based on Wajdi Mouawad’s novel Visage Retrouvée, is a hybrid work of music theatre, a through-composed score with a spoken dramatic monologue, supported thematically by a trio of female voices representing aspects of motherhood.

In it, a young boy, Wahab, takes a bus to see his dying mother in hospital. During his journey Wahab begins to confront the trauma that separated them, as fragments of Oum Kalthoum’s song Al Atlal/The Ruins begin to emerge through the music. El-Turk’s musical language reaches for Middle Eastern traditions through its instrumentation and use of improvisation, embracing the experimental through use of extended techniques. At one point, to depict a fire, the violinists of the Amsterdam Andalusian Orchestra were required to tremolando so hard – and so near the bridge – that the city’s emergency bow re-hairers must have had a busy weekend.

The piece begins with a wistful vocalise of unison violin and cello before an element of dark menace asserts itself in a repeating bass figure that evokes the all-too-familiar site of columns of ordinary people on the move against their will. Behind the musicians, who play from the stage, a long white veil hangs and flutters like a net curtain from a bombed building. In this drama of painful return, El-Turk’s enveloping sound world captures the texture of memory: brief rising figures in the flute are like something glimpsed fleetingly from the corner of the eye, then there’s the umbilical pull of the lower strings and the driving intensity of the percussion. In the story’s most bittersweet moment, as Wahab finally recognises his mother’s face, El-Turk gives us a jazz-inflected duet between voice and accordion. As two worlds connect, too late, the music movingly expresses the tantalising closeness of those who have just passed out of reach.

The love for Oum Kalthoum and her music was palpable and mezzo-soprano Ghalia Benali responded in kind by urging the only-too-willing Andalusian Orchestra – and the audience – to join her in an exuberant encore.

There was exuberance elsewhere, too, as 170 students of Rotterdam’s MBO Theatre School and Amsterdam’s Free University Choir filled the stage in the uplifting and vigorously choreographed Codes, described by its director Gregory Caers as “a gift to the city” for Amsterdam’s 750th anniversary. The codes of the title are seven rituals for urban youth to live by, none of which involves an electronic device, but instead focus on such exhortations as ‘Stand Your Ground’ as well as the joyous chorus ‘Happiness Was Not A Brand’.

Quieter, smaller, but with no less emotional impact than anything on the main stage, was a video installation, plus panel discussion, from The Sound Voice Project, a Royal Opera commissioned collaboration between Hannah Conway and Hazel Gould that premiered in the Linbury last autumn and is already changing the conversation about laryngectomy among medical professionals. Working with the link between voice and identity, the project asks the painful question of what happens when someone loses their voice. The installation is a series of profoundly moving duets between opera singers Roderick Williams and Lucy Crowe, and cancer patients on the other side of a laryngectomy, and uses digital sound and image manipulation to create a powerfully immersive experience.

To pack all that into a single weekend certainly takes some doing. But then again there’s no rest for anyone for whom this season’s mission statement is to“‘transcend the everyday”.

Eleanor's accommodation in Amsterdam was funded by Dutch National Opera