Garcia's Transcending Time last night in Gavella

The opera Transcending Time by the American composer Orlando Jacinto Garcia was performed yesterday with great success to a half-full auditorium of the Gavella Theatre.

According to the author, this non-narrative opera does not share any concrete features with the usual perception of the genre, except for its title.

The ensemble and the ‘principal’ vocal soloist stand on the stage, whereas the other four soloists, who form a kind of chamber choir, are arranged on all four sides of the auditorium, surrounding the audience. The work resulted from the composer’s collaboration with two video artists, John Stuart, an architect by profession, then Jacek Jerzy Kolasinski and poet Campbell McGrath, who wrote the libretto. The composer said that the intention of his opera was to freeze the perception of time, which is the concept he indeed plays with in his music. Besides, having combined his music with videos, he wanted every listener to gain individual experience of all the elements integrated in the opera by means of their own references to the video projections.

The ten alternating video clips provide a brilliant accompaniment to Garcia’s music which is rather languid and slow, continuing at length and seemingly static but not in the least boring. The acoustic combination of electronic music and the ensemble playing live is well-balanced, whereas frequent repetitions and the fluent flow of sound waves can easily suggest falling into a trance. The contrast is based on the video clips created by the two different artists, which is quite obvious. Stuart made all odd-numbered videos, while Kolasinski did the even numbers, so that in the former ones one can recognize clear geometrical structures and the latter ones display more action and a narrative tone. The aesthetic guiding the work of both Stuart and Kolasinski is contrastive, and their respective closing videos draw on the previous footages as a conclusion.

The Transcending Time is based on the form of an arch, which can be distinctly discerned when the composition is first heard. The sound effects produced by the ensemble together with the vocal soloists make the music simply logical and enable the whole venue to be filled with sounds, while the singers walking around the auditorium additionally contribute to the sense of surround sound.

The successful premiere of the opera given yesterday at the Gavella Theatre is attributed to the brilliant Cantus Ensemble, mezzo-soprano Martina Gojčeta Silić, soloists Monika Cerovčec, Martina Matić Borse, Neven Mrzlečki, and Goran Jurić, and to maestro Mladen Tarbuk, who kept the performers ‘assembled’ in a composed but suggestive enough manner.