Philippe Manoury - 60th Parallel (2000)

Tracklist:
Disc 1
1. Prologue (Musique electronique) 00:01:17
2. Prelude 00:06:25
3. En d'autres temps, cette fin m'aurait fait rire 00:11:07
4. Maria se dirige vers le telephone 00:05:16
5. Interlude Musical ('Wait') 00:07:31
6. Interlude Musical 00:05:35
7. Interlude Musical 00:03:45
8. Interlude Musical ('Choral') 00:03:16
9. Non, non. C'est toujours le meme. 00:06:53
10. Your attention, please… 00:03:46
11. Deux cents morceaux. 00:02:10
12. Your attention, please. Final call… final call… . 00:03:56

Disc 2
1. Vous avez vu cette jeune personne 00:01:28
2. Interlude nuit. 00:10:29
3. Le passe qui revient, qui remonte a la surface 00:01:53
4. Une lumiere jaune, striee par les lumieres clignotantes rouges du chasse - neige… 00:03:48
5. Un temps. 00:05:34
6. Le telephone contre le mur se met a sonner. Maria se precipite vers l'appareil et decroche. 00:03:54
7. Applaudisements 00:00:41

Courtis, Jean-Philippe, bass
Davies, Menai, mezzo-soprano
Fassbender, Hedwig, mezzo-soprano
Gay, Paul, bass-baritone
Hamada, Rie, soprano
Keller, Marie Therese, mezzo-soprano
Maxwell, Donald, baritone
Salzmann, Jean-Marc, baritone
Thompson, Ian, tenor
Orchestre de Paris
Robertson, David, Conductor

Passengers blocked by a blizzard in an airport on the 60th parallel. During the prelude Wim, a fugitive war criminal, recognises a certain Uwe Straub among the passengers. Knowing the man is carrying compromising documents, he follows him and kills him in the toilets. Rudy, who has long been hunting Wim, has witnessed this and starts a conversation with him. Anja is taking Maria on holiday to Miami to help her to forget a man. During the night, when everyone is asleep, she secretly confesses her love. Doctor Wittkop, an old, bemused scholar, is preparing a lecture on Einstein's brain, which he has just acquired. An old woman, a wanderer, a stewardess, a voice from an airport loudspeaker that utters strange phrases … destinies meeting whilst awaiting a hypothetical departure.
60th Parallel: Music like the unseen part of an iceberg
Composing an opera means first of all finding a form capable of expressing a dramatic situation. In the beginning there existed only the Prelude, from an old abandoned project. Very quickly, with Michel Deutsch and Pierre Strosser, the idea of an enclosed space was established. Soon too, the airport seemed to us the ideal place, a waiting place (time) which can suggest that things could have begun earlier and likewise may never end. A catalyst at first, the music of the Prelude finally found its true function – as much poetic as formal. The opera as a whole may be seen as an immense re-writing of the Prelude. The Prelude never stops – like the storm outside. If it seems to disappear, it is only to return later, as if the music had been carrying on elsewhere. It can reappear "at any moment". Moreover, this is the key to the opera. The tensions do not come from a logical progression, but rather from a sudden eruption, as is often the case in real life. Also as in reality, utterances serve to mask that reality rather than clarify it. In their seeming simplicity they are but the visible part of an iceberg. So the voices are as if lost in the storm, emerging from the music of the orchestra or from the computer. I wanted this music to be multiform, charged with energy ready to explode at any moment. It is not there to accompany the voices, but rather to say what the characters are unable to express – to reveal the hidden part of the iceberg. In this story, the characters are deprived of both temporal and geographical reference points. That is why I did not give this opera a structure of acts or separate scenes. When an orchestral interlude seems to be intervening, the presence of the voice shatters its effect, to show that it is not a matter of transition between two distinct moments, but that these moments are constantly changing like the clouds and that it is the story that is moving on. My idea is to avoid anything resembling a closed form, to construct a form which eventually eludes the watcher, just as the present moment and reality itself elude him. Of course, there are events, breaks, for this is not background music. But the breaks also evoke the memory of a moment that is gone and will never be repeated, again as in real life. To compose an opera is to create a reality, however abnormal. Not to explain it, nor reveal it, but to suggest its existence and solidity, even while providing very few data to work with.





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CD 1
CD 2

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