אופרה מקורית שהועלתה במסגרת פסטיבל המוסיקה של הבינאלה בונציה ב-6 לאוקטובר 2019.
קרדיטים וקומוניקט:
Talya Eliav – Ab Ovo (chamber opera) libretto by Liron Barchat
Composer Talya Eliav
Librettist Liron Barchat
premiere 6 October 2019
Teatro Piccolo Arsenale
Venezia
secretary, soprano, Elena Tereshchenko
alcoholic Lady, Soprano, Eleonora Claps
cleaning Man, Baritono, Francesco Basso
people Teme Spoalor, Betty Viscardi, Marco Ferraro
stage direction Francesca Merli
conductor Matthieu Mantanus
Ensemble Novecento dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia
electronics CIMM – Centro di Informatica Musicale e Multimediale della Biennale di Venezia
computer music design Shai Lowenstein,
Maurilio Cacciatore
set design Davide Signorini
light design Moritz Zavan Stockle
make-up Anna Lazzarini
costumes Davide Signorini and Francesca Merli
props Cecilia Sacchi
video animation Ehsan Mehrbakhsh
répétiteurs Marina D’Ambroso, Alessia Toffanin
recording Matteo Costa
production La Biennale di Venezia
in collaboration with Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia
The opera takes place in an imagined pre-linguistic world and presents the routine of a woman working as a secretary at a reception desk. The visitors to her office come in holding eggs of different sizes and wait for a strange bureaucratic procedure. This selective procedure is supervised by a humanized computer, with which the secretary consults, and at the end of the process, the fate of each egg is determined. The potential of some eggs is recognized and realized, while the potential of others will never be revealed. No one knows what factors influence the computer’s decision. The language sung in this surreal and dream-like space is an invented one, a language of no place and of many places. With these invented words, the chant-like music creates a ritualistic atmosphere; we are in a primordial future. The plot is complicated by the appearance of one unusual egg, the destiny of which the computer cannot decide. The mechanism of the bureaucratic system gets stuck, which leads to the beginning of a special relationship between a secretary and COSMA – a cosmic egg.
The opera offers an imaginary alternative to the myth of the world’s creation and presents the absurd possibility that the existence of various worlds in the universe is determined by an arbitrary selection that takes place within a dull office routine.