Lod & Musiques Nouvelles & Vocaallab Amsterdam . Filip Rathé

2011 marks the centenary of Maurice Maeterlinck's receipt of the Nobel Prize for Literature. Next year, 2012, we are celebrating the hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of his birth. The young Bruges composer Daan Janssens (b. 1983), has joined forces with stage designer Patrick Corillon to engage with Maeterlinck's poetical world. The basic idea for the stage design is a magic lantern, a machine that the singers manipulate simply, almost childishly. In 'De Blinden' (The Blind), we see six blind people (singers) in a dark, autumnal wood, awaiting the return of a priest. They converse, in order to temper the fear aroused by the sounds around them - Nature's signals - a flight of nightbirds, the wind rustling through dead leaves, the swishing of the nearby sea. They interpret all these ever more emphatically as signs of an impending catastrophic event - death. The dramatic rhythm takes its pulse from an alternation of ebb and flow, of fear and hope, that steadily gathers pace as the opera proceeds … until the moment when they discover the dead body of the priest, the only one who could have shown them a way out.