STER-KINEKOR CINEMA NOUVEAU BRINGS OPERA TO LIFE THIS DECEMBER
The Exterminating Angel screening from 16 December 2017
Opera in three acts
The 7th Metropolitan Opera performance of Thomas Adès’s
Following the rapturous response to his last opera, The Tempest, the Met presents the American premiere of Thomas Adès’s: The Exterminating Angel; inspired by the classic Luis Buñuel film of the same name. This is another exclusive screening brought to you by Ster-Kinekor Cinema Nouveau.
Hailed by the New York Times at its 2016 Salzburg Festival premiere as “inventive and audacious… a major event,” The Exterminating Angel is a surreal fantasy about a dinner party from which the guests can’t escape. Luis Buñuel’s classic 1962 film El Ángel Exterminador (The Exterminating Angel), which inspired Thomas Adès and librettist Tom Cairns’s opera, has an unusual premise: A sophisticated group of people at a dinner party find that, for reasons that are never explained or even deeply questioned, they cannot leave the room they are in. Over an indeterminate period of time, their basest instincts emerge, and even when the survivors manage to escape, they find that they may be trapped again elsewhere. The film defies attempts at systematic analysis and even seems to denounce the need for answers as one of society’s many pathologies. The idea of using a film as a source for an opera is not shocking itself, but adapting one that has baffled and fascinated both audiences and critics is an extraordinary task. Admittedly, there are obvious ways in which El Ángel Exterminador commends itself to the opera house: There are operatic references in the story, and a formal dinner party is itself a form of theatre—one in which there is an acknowledged gulf between what people say and what they actually mean. Still, the strange conceit of this particular film presents great challenges—namely, the unanswered question of why this is all happening.
The Setting
The opera is set in and around a mansion in a large city suggestive of—but not definitively stated to be—Mexico City, during the 1960s.
The Music
Adès’s score examines through music, the ideas Buñuel explored with dialogue and visuals alone. (In fact, the film itself has almost no musical underscoring). As the story moves from the comfortably elegant to the disturbingly surreal, pleasant party music evolves into a more unusual ambience, but the familiar and the puzzling are always present in various configurations. Despite the ensemble nature of the work—more than a dozen singers appear onstage together throughout most of the evening—a unique musical personality differentiates each character. The layering of individual voices is one of the fascinations of the score, culminating in such ensemble pieces as a chorus that depicts a sudden retreat into group obsessive compulsive disorder.
Watch the trailer of The Exterminating Angel and access more information here: www.metopera.org/Season/2017-18-Season/exterminating-angel-ades-tickets/
The Exterminating Angel will be screened on 16, 17, 19, 26 and 27 December 2017.
The film will show at Cinema Nouveau and select Ster-Kinekor sites: Rosebank Nouveau, Brooklyn Nouveau and V&A Waterfront Nouveau. At Somerset and Blue Route Mall in Cape Town and Bedford Square in Johannesburg.
Season at a Glance: The Met: Live in HD 2017-18
- Tosca (24 February 2018)
- L’Elisir d’Amore (10 March 2018)
- La Bohème (24 March 2018)
- Semiramide (07 April 2018)
- Così fan tutte (28 April 2018)
- Luisa Miller (12 May 2018)
- Cendrillon (26 May 2018).
Bookings are now open
For more information and to make bookings feast your eyes on all three mesmerizing productions, visit the website at www.sterkinekor.com or download the SK App. You can also book at the box office. For news and updates, go to Facebook page: Ster-Kinekor and follow Ster-Kinekor on Twitter: @sterkinekor. For all queries, call Ticketline on 0861 Movies (668 437).
