Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.In the film Tár, the eponymous conductor’s downfall is symbolised by a click track. In a nameless Asian country, she has to wear headphones through which the beat is fed to her while she conducts video game music. At a press conference in the film’s opening sequence, Tár tells her interlocutor that she can control time. At the end, she is its slave.When conductor Ariane Matiakh walks to the podium for Mikael Karlsson’s new opera Fanny and Alexander, which had its world premiere at La Monnaie, she is wearing the headphones of doom. It is no coincidence that this new opera sounds like a mash-up of video game music and something composed by ChatGPT. Karlsson is a composer of video game music, and the house had ominously heralded the piece as something that combined electronic elements with innovative technology. If that’s your jam, grab a ticket.Operas based on films are a tricky business. Films have music anyhow; why bother? Too often they end up looking like third-rate copies of the real thing. To the credit of director Ivo van Hove and designer Jan Versweyveld, their staging has its own pared-back aesthetic, combining a forest, walls of mirrors, and elements of a doll’s house to create an abstract psychological space. Christopher Ash’s dreamlike videos also stand alone.But they get no help from the piece itself. An opera usually elongates its subject matter. In the case of Ingmar Bergman’s epic (312 minutes in the full TV mini-series, 188 minutes in the cinema version), the entire team must reduce the material tremendously; many characters bite the dust, and only a few scenes survive. Even so, Royce Vavrek’s libretto is wordy and awkward. He makes some dubious decisions, such as drawing out and repeating Alexander’s swearing — whispered in the film, a shouted stream of expletives in the opera.Karlsson’s score is turgid, muddy, sluggish and dull. His harmonic scope is trite and limited, and he borrows abundantly from the gestures of minimalism without any originality. His orchestration is so dense that the singers must be mic’d throughout, and even so, most of their text is inaudible. The dynamic level hovers on loud, occasionally rising to louder, to deadening effect. Anyone who has played with the compositional capacities of artificial intelligence knows that computer-generated music lacks every spark of originality; if Karlsson’s new score was not written by a robot, it certainly sounds as if it was.What a waste of resources. Imagine having singers like Susan Bullock, Anne Sofie von Otter, Sasha Cooke and Thomas Hampson, and then making them do this. Tenor Peter Tantsits has the worst of it as Oscar; clearly Karlsson and his robot have read somewhere that tenors can sing high notes, so they have scored way more of them than any actual human could comfortably produce. Tantsits does his best, but it hurts to watch.To be fair, von Otter, Hampson, Cooke, Bullock and their peers do sing superbly, under the circumstances, and act their hearts out. Boy soprano Jay Weiner delivers a phenomenal Alexander, utterly confident, note-perfect. Young Sarah Dewez is also very polished as Fanny, though she has little to sing. Bergman’s film only just scrapes past the Bechdel test, but Vavrek’s libretto omits the few scenes which centre the women; his vocalese for Helena at the beginning and end barely count. It is 2024, yet here is another opera where the women only exist to reflect on the men or discuss their families. Even when Helena hands the theatre direction over to Emilie at the end, it is because that is what Oscar wanted. Hiring a female conductor does not solve this problem. Matiakh acquits her role with intelligence and aplomb, but with a score like this, she can never be much more than a mixture of metronome and glorified traffic cop. La Monnaie has ample resources and a capable leadership. How could they let this happen?★☆☆☆☆To December 19, lamonnaiedemunt.be/en
