Output details

Anya 17 Chamber opera for five soloists and 14-piece orchestra. Awayday Music

Anya 17, which deals with international sex trafficking between Eastern and Western Europe, is built on both overt and deeply embedded tensions and contrasts. The libretto explores the innocence of the ‘East’ being corrupted by the temptations of the ‘West’; trusting young women are betrayed by smooth-talking manipulators; expectations of basic human values are disabused. Themes of ‘corruption’ and ‘jarring contrasts’ are also the basis of the research imperative that is worked out in the composition. For example, stark and deliberately arresting contrasts between Eastern and Western European popular idioms are explored within a contemporary classical operatic framework: various low-art musical genres including klezmer, nightclub jazz, the Broadway musical and rock rhythms are invoked both as dangerously seductive elements and bleakly dehumanising, as the victims lose their identity through brutal treatment. At the structural level, this takes the form of various musical deconstructions as the rhythmic and harmonic language that has its foundations in pulse-driven diatonicism is continuously ‘corrupted’. For example, the instrumental spacing and tessitura of the chromatically-saturated fortissimo opening chord contains the foundation of much of the musical material for the entire opera, material which is then ‘dismantled’ as the work progresses. Meanwhile, the melodic writing for the ‘corrupted’ characters becomes progressively more stylised, featuring wide leaps and the lowest vocal registers.

Première: Philharmonic Hall Liverpool. Cast from Royal Northern College of Music with RLPO 10/10 ensemble, conductor Clark Rundell, March 7 2012; European première: Timişoara National Opera, Romania, 17 October 2013. Fully-staged première: Südthüringisches Staatstheater, Meiningen, Germany, November–January 2013/14. US première: Opera Parallèle, San Francisco, June 20–22 2014.