The Opera #3 – The Outtakes

The acclaimed independent performing arts company Novoflot, founded in Berlin in 2002 by director Sven Holm, conductor Vicente Larrañaga and performance artist and dramaturg Sebastian Bark, is coming for the first time to Greece and the GNO Alternative Stage.

Novoflot have appeared at numerous theatres and festivals in Berlin, as well as across Germany and internationally; their over 45, open-minded music theatre events that unite the genres of contemporary opera, experimental music theatre and avant-garde installation have been performed in theatres, opera houses, concert halls and exhibition spaces as well as in mobile architectures, sport stadiums, former fitness studios and sunken churches, integrating the public space into their concepts.

In collaboration with eminent Greek composer Antonis Anissegos and the adventurous dissonArt ensemble from Thessaloniki, Novoflot present the final two parts of their ingenious three-year trilogy entitled The Opera #1–#3, a project that takes up Claudio Monteverdi’s three known works and… fills in the missing pieces one by one!

What if Claudio Monteverdi, the so-called “founding father” of the opera genre, had not only bequeathed us his three famous works L’Orfeo, Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria and L’incoronazione di Poppea, but also the 15 additional operas on which the Italian composer had worked, the scores of which however are considered lost? How would the genre have developed? Would opera look or sound different today? After compressing all genre elements to the maximum in the first part of their cycle, Novoflot present Monteverdi’s first lost opera, #2 – On the Ropes (About the End), joined on stage by a number of internationally renowned jazz soloists!

Lastly, in the outsized, open-air finale of their music theatre trilogy, #3 – The Outtakes, Novoflot focus on the pieces that did not “make it to the finals” and turn the Stavros Niarchos Park Great Lawn at the SNFCC into an operatic track and field championship! One can only guess how much material remains unused when a film is cut, a book is edited or a piece of music is produced, and how much heart and soul goes into such a process. In the end, there is always the agonising question of whether the right choice has really been made. This is how the pioneer of opera, Claudio Monteverdi, must have felt when he was finalising his stage works…

The production is made possible by a grant from the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF) [www.SNF.org] to enhance the Greek National Opera’s artistic outreach.