Andriessen - Theatre of the World

The Guardian 80

Melrose/Kesselman/Zavalloni/Los Angeles Philharmonic/De Leeuw
(Nonesuch, two CDs)

Louis Andriessen’s “grotesque in nine scenes”, built around the life and work of the 17th-century German polymath Athanasius Kircher, received its premiere in LA’s Walt Disney Concert Hall in May last year, and arrived in Amsterdam with the same cast the following month. Like almost all of Andriessen’s stage works, Theatre of the World hovers somewhere between opera house and concert hall, and the over-busy staging of the premiere added another layer to what is already a rather dense plot and multilingual text.

The exemplary Nonesuch recording is taken from the LA performances, and without the multimedia distractions it’s much easier to appreciate the strengths of Andriessen’s score and follow the details of the scenario, which takes the ageing Kircher, sung with tremendous presence by Leigh Melrose, on a review of his life’s achievements and failures. Certainly, with Reinbert de Leeuw conducting the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the wind-dominated instrumental music emerges more powerfully in all its array of styles – from children’s songs and the baroque to jazz and serialism – than it did live in Amsterdam. There are superb performances from Cristina Zavalloni as Juana Inés de la Cruz, the Mexican nun in whom Kircher thought he had discovered a soul-mate, and Lindsay Kesselman as the boy who guides him on this surreal journey through his memories.