Die Kinder Des Sultans
PUBLISHER G Schirmer Inc
ORCHESTRATION 2(pic).2.2(bcl).2(cbn)/4.2.1+btbn.0/timp.3perc/str
SOLOISTS S, 2Mz, T, Bar, 2B
CHORUS SATB
REVIEWS
It's a fairytale story like from 1001 Nights: the children Fadeya and Taseh are looking for their father, the sultan, in the land of Sultania, whom they never really got to know. They have to survive three exciting adventures. The music of the Israeli composer Avner Dorman impresses with its diverse rhythms and the staging through oriental splendor of colour. The school performance of "The Sultan's Children" on November 15, 2022 at 11:00 a.m. ended with thunderous applause, shrill screams of enthusiasm and calls for an encore. 800 children came to the opera with their school classes to see the fantastic fairy tale opera, which, after the world premiere on March 20, 2022 in Dortmund, was taken over on November 13, 2022 in Bonn as part of the "Junge Oper Rhein-Ruhr" cooperation. (Visited performance -school performance- on 15.11.2022 )
The librettist, the well-known children's and young people's theater author Ingeborg von Zadow, really knows her craft, because she combines a contemporary story of a separated, intercultural family with elements of oriental fairy tales and diverse allusions to classical operas. She uses witty alliteration and creates three exciting exam situations that the children will prove themselves in, and a happy ending.
The Israeli composer Avner Dorman , who lives in New York and experiences the melting pot of cultures up close, has composed a real opera with a large string section, double wind instruments and three percussionists, who also play the oriental goblet darbuka. Avner Dorman is famous for the Concerto for Percussion and Orchestra (2007), which he wrote specifically for the percussionist Martin Grubinger, and his opera also impresses with its varied rhythms and oriental colouring, but he also quotes Bach's coffee cantata. Some orchestral passages, for example the music to the raging river in which Taseh is about to drown, are reminiscent of Shostakovich, and there is a beautiful lyrical lullaby and song as the signature tune:"With a camel as a friend you can always go further" , which imitates the pace of the camel with its 7/8 time. The camel has a high prestige in the desert lands, similar to the horse in our country. The particularly polyphonic choir of the Theater Bonn, under the direction of Marco Medved , dressed in colorful costumes as traders at the bazaar, and the Beethoven Orchestra in the best of moods create international flair with oriental colouring. Kapellmeister Daniel Johannes Mayr admires Dorman's fairytale opera "that it combines many styles and still finds its own tonal language," as he says in an interview with the Bonn Generalanzeiger on November 12/13, 2022. The sounding result is always very catchy.
Bonn Opera/CHILDREN OF THE SULTANS/Pavel Kudinov (Dragon Snake)/Photo Thilo Beu
Tatjana Ivschina 's design is very complex and also uses video effects by Boris Kahnert , for example the lighting effects of the wall in front of the palace that lights up in psychedelic colors. There was applause at the last picture with the many lanterns and the moon. The children Fadeya and Taseh are dressed like normal children with jeans and sweatshirts, everyone else is colorful like from 1001 Nights. I particularly liked the camel worn by the willowy Susanne Blattert with her fat suit and fur bra that becomes the camel's humps, and the blue djinn with a big belly, in which the young baritone Carl Rumstadt is stuck. They are arch comedians who obviously enjoy the play a lot.
The director Anna Drescher delivers 75 minutes of entertaining entertainment with depth to the young audience from the 3rd school year, which is also due to the very good singing and playful ensemble.
The young soprano Ava Gesell and the tenor Santiago Sánchez , who grew up in Spain, are the twin siblings Fadeya and Taseh, who go in search of their father, the sultan, with the talking camel ( Susanne Blattert ). The sultan's evil brother ( Carl Rumstadt ) wants to prevent the meeting - the children would be in the line of succession before him! After three exciting adventures - first a giant snake wants to eat the children, the jinn helps them out, then a raging river is supposed to swallow Taseh, Fadeya can save her brother from the floods with the help of a magic carpet, and finally the desert in front of the children an insurmountable wall, there is the black giant bird (Pavel Kudinov ), kindred spirit of Wagner's Waldvöglein, gave the crucial clue. The key is the lullaby that mother and father used to sing to them and that gradually comes back to them: “We come from two worlds. You from here, I from there."
Eventually, the children meet their father, the Sultan ( Pavel Kudinov ). It turns out that the camel is none other than the children's aunt, the sultan's sister, and that the evil uncle intercepted the letters that the children's parents wrote to each other, thus destroying the relationship between the two. But everyone forgives each other, and the children are finally reunited with their father, the Sultan, whom they have not seen for so long. The final chorus of the big celebration of the reunion was enthusiastically clapped along by the students.
The buffo element is contributed by Juhwan Cho as the water seller and Sara Léna Winterberg as the fortune teller, who of course foresees everything. She also plays the mother who writes one letter after the other on a side stage before the performance begins.
All three adventures ended with spontaneous applause, and by the end the children were asking for more. It is a real family opera, because the parents Constanze - Sultan come from different cultures. The children are the heroes, because it is thanks to their initiative that their long-separated parents get back together. The dear aunt, who disguises herself as a camel to protect the children, and the evil uncle, who is jealous of his older brother, complete the nuclear family. In the end, the evil uncle regrets his meanness and everyone forgives one another in the spirit of Mozart - nothing is as ugly as revenge!
Stage design and costume design pull out all the stops, especially when it comes to the blaze of color and lighting effects, and the children were quite amazed at how the stage technology works in a live opera. They were as quiet as a mouse and fully focused and cheered the choir, the ensemble and the conductor Daniel Johannes Mayr like pop stars. Children and young people really like the very rhythmic music!
"Young Operas Rhein-Ruhr" is a concept that is funded by the state of North Rhine-Westphalia. The opera houses in Dortmund, Bonn and Düsseldorf/Duisburg alternately produce family operas, which are performed in all four houses with the same scenery and costumes and their own ensembles, choirs and orchestras. The prices for the early evening performances are family-friendly, i.e. lower than other opera performances, and tickets for the school performances at 11 a.m. cost only €6.00 per student. This enables many children to participate in art and culture who would otherwise never have come to the opera.
The family operas are commissioned compositions and no longer than 75 minutes and are played without a break with a really large cast in the big house.
Review by Ursula Hartlapp-Lindemeyer / Red. DAS OPERNMAGAZIN