Leoš Janáček’s Diary of One Who Disappeared gets the Ivo van Hove treatment at BAM (photo © Jan Versweyveld)
BAM Howard Gilman Opera House
Peter Jay Sharp Building
230 Lafayette Ave.
April 4-6, $28-$140, 7:30
718-636-4100
www.bam.org
www.transparant.be
You can always expect something unexpected from Belgian director Ivo van Hove, and such is the case with his latest production at BAM, Diary of One Who Disappeared. The Tony and Olivier Award winner has staged the Arthur Miller double play of A View from the Bridge and The Crucible on Broadway, a three-and-a-half-hour rotating version of Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage at New York Theatre Workshop, and the massive four-plus-hour Kings of War at BAM, among other shows that can blow your mind. This week he’s back at BAM with the US premiere of Flemish opera company Muziektheater Transparant’s Diary of One Who Disappeared, a sixty-five-minute adaptation of Leoš Janáček’s song cycle, inspired by the sixty-three-year-old Czech composer’s relationship with twenty-six-year-old Kamila Stösslová. “I don’t have words to express my longing for you, to be close to you,” Janáček wrote to Stösslová. “I know that my compositions will be more passionate, more ravishing: you’ll sit on every little note in them. I’ll caress them; every little note will be your dark eye.” The work features actor Wim van der Grijn, tenor Andrew Dickinson, mezzo soprano Marie Hamard, pianist Lada Valešová, and a choir trio of Raphaële Green, Annelies Van Gramberen, and Naomi Beeldens. The set and lighting is by Jan Versweyveld, with costumes by An D’Huys and four new musical fragments by Annelies Van Parys.