Album...
Someone Is Going To Come
Release date: 2006
Composed by: Knut Vaage
Text by: Jon Fosse, adapted to libretto by Knut Vaage supervised by Jon Fosse
Performed by: BIT20 Ensemble
Press
The music is rather descriptive and programmatically linked to late Romanticism. The natural beauty and the waves are heard as opening music so clearly that there would actually be no need for projections of forest and waves on the semi-circular wall during these musical passages, so concrete and suggestive does the ensemble sound. The deep wind instruments dominate the coloring. Small melodic formulas dominate the song accompaniment. The music flows coherently, but also follows exciting psychological developments on stage; the song is melodious and seems to float high. (freely translated into Norwegian)
"In Kaiserslautern, two contemporary one-act plays made their German premieres, showcasing the intense and mysterious musicality of Knut Vaage and the lively absurdity of Camille Kerger. The performances, marked by a masterful chamber ensemble and dynamic direction, captivated the audience with their distinct auras, offering an engaging experience in modern music theatre." (freely translated from German)
"At first glance, these two one-act operas may seem unrelated, yet their exploration of universal themes—love, jealousy, miscommunication, and the past—creates an intriguing blend. 'Someone Is Going To Come' by Knut Vaage and 'Ein Mond aus kochender Milch' by Camille Kerger, performed at Théâtre National du Luxembourg, offer a unique juxtaposition. Despite their differences, directors Frank Hoffmann and Urs Häberli aptly titled their collaborative project 'Shadows of the Past.'" (freely translated from German)
"Vaage's treatment of Jon Fosse's play about a young couple that moves into a house possessed by spirits of its former inhabitants has theatrical pulse and achieves probing instrumental effects despite an orchestra of only eight players. There's room for more grateful vocal writing, but "Someone Is Going To Come" revealed a promising dramatic talent."
(…) The libretto, based on a play by Jon Fosse, recalls the gloomy melancholy of early Bergman films. The Norwegian composer Knut Vaage has created a dramatic and threatening music on the threshold of atonality, which constantly returns to fragments of songs. Just as the first part of the evening is minimalistic, quiet and somnambulistically floating, the second part entitled "A moon of boiling milk" is staged as a braying comic and screamingly colorful, like an oblique spectacle. In this chamber opera from Luxembourg, an event manager wants to open a nightclub in an old dairy building. During the negotiations with the heir, both are attacked by a murderer (...) (freely translated into Norwegian)
"Friday saw the start of the Ultima Festival. The most anticipated was Knut Vaage's opera "Nokon kjem til å komme" with text by Jon Fosse."
"More like that please! Someone will come is in many ways a Spartan opera. Three singers on a very simple stage, a compact libretto, no big facts. But the music carries the drama, and makes it rich."
"Projects are bold - but the result, which premiered in Oslo on Friday, is in many ways a success. Vaage has written music that is not tempted to imitate Fosse's distinctive, repetitive style, but which nevertheless matches the text - with its own means."
"Bull's eye for Fosses and Vaage's Opera. Knut Vaage convinces in his debut as an opera composer, he clarifies and stylizes Jon Fosse's text and gives the singers something to sharpen their wits about."
"This musically inventive and dramatically tense work was well received and deserves a wider hearing."