Eivør and Marilyn The Opera

Mais fotos da ópera Anyone Can See I love You foram divulgadas há alguns minutos atrás na página do facebook da Eivør. Confira:

Fotos da Eivør como a Marilyn

Há poucas horas atrás a Eivør divulgou, através de sua página no facebook, duas fotos tiradas da ópera do Gavin Bryars "Anyone Can see I love you",caracterizada como a sua personagem, Marilyn Monroe.

Marilyn Monroe Opera

Anyone Can See I Love You, a new opera about the life of Marilyn Monroe, opens at theBanff Centre, Canada, this weekend.

Eivør Pálsdóttir, a singer-songwriter from the Faroese islands, plays Monroe, and the production may tour internationally.


Composed by Gavin Bryars, the opera is based on Marilyn Bowering‘s 1987 poetry collection of the same name, which has also been adapted as a radio play for BBC Scotland.


Incidentally, Monroe herself stayed in Banff while filming River of No Return in 1953.

Source: by marina72

Opera for a sex goddess

Singers Eivør Pálsdóttir and Richard Morris in costume for the opera Anyone Can See I love You at The Banff Centre. The libretto is by the Canadian writer Marilyn Bowering, who lives in Sooke. The music is by Gavin Bryars, who is based in his native England but has spent part of each year in Metchosin.

Photograph by: Banff Centre, timescolonist.com

The creation of a new opera, a big deal even in a major musical centre, counts as a very big deal in a moderate-sized city like Victoria, especially when the stature of the artists involved, and the subject, guarantee it will attract international attention.

Such is the case with Anyone Can See I Love You, an opera in development here. The libretto is by Marilyn Bowering, who lives in Sooke. The music is by Gavin Bryars, who is based in his native England but has spent part of each year in Metchosin since meeting his wife here 12 years ago. And the subject is an imperishable icon of 20th-century popular culture: Marilyn Monroe.

The opera was commissioned by the Aventa Ensemble, a widely admired local chamber orchestra devoted to contemporary music, founded in 2003 (and still directed) by the percussionist and conductor Bill Linwood. Ambitious and adventurous, Aventa has premièred more than 50 works over the years, but Anyone Can See I Love You is its first operatic commission. Funding for the project, whose total cost could easily reach $250,000, is coming from various foundations and government sources.

The opera, according to Bowering, explores the tragic arc of Monroe's life and her "intellectual and emotional relationship to death and love," through the prism of her relationships with men, particularly her three husbands. Bowering, a much-honoured poet and novelist, has also written for radio, stage and film, but this is her first operatic venture (she says she is "a longtime lover of opera"). The libretto is based on a collection of poems of the same title, written in Monroe's voice, that Bowering published in 1987 and that she has already used as the basis for a radio play and a theatre piece.

The Monroe poems immediately came up when Bryars and Linwood first began discussing the possibility of a new opera, about five years ago. (Bryars and Bowering are old friends, and he set a text of hers as a song in 2002.) Bryars admired the original poems as well as the "terrific" radio play, which included popular songs associated with Monroe -- one of them being Anyone Can See I Love You, which she sang in the 1948 movie Ladies of the Chorus. Bryars says that his music for the opera will include references to such songs, and will be built around a "nucleus of jazz."

Bryars enjoys contributing to interdisciplinary projects, and his omnivorousness and versatility as a composer make him open to collaborating with artists in many fields: classical, avant-garde, jazz, folk and pop musicians, symphony orchestras and early-music ensembles, theatre and dance companies, visual artists, filmmakers. He already has three operas to his credit: Medea, after Euripides; Doctor Ox's Experiment, after Jules Verne's novella; and G, about Johannes Gutenberg.

Anyone Can See I Love You will be an intimate chamber opera, with a female singer as Monroe, one or more male singers representing the men in her life, perhaps a chorus and about a dozen instrumentalists (including a jazz trio). But all this is still tentative, as the opera is in its infancy; the libretto is not finished, and Bryars has been working on the score only for a few weeks.

The project has just taken a big step forward, however. For more than a week, the opera has been the focus of a workshop at the Banff Centre, as part of the Banff Summer Arts Festival. More than 20 people have participated in it, including Bryars, Bowering, Linwood, members of the Aventa Ensemble, the young Canadian operatic director Joel Ivany, the English baritone Richard Morris and Eivør Pálsdóttir, a striking 26-year-old singer-songwriter from the Faroe Islands, for whom the lead role is being written. (Bryars worked with her in the Faroes in 2008.)

Rooted in traditional Faroese music but also classically trained, Eivør (she goes by her first name) is unclassifiable in the best sense -- you can hear her on YouTube in everything from folk songs to works with orchestra to Stand by Your Man.

The Banff workshop will culminate this evening in An Evening With Gavin Bryars, a sold-out concert that will include staged performances of several scenes from the opera, with Bryars joining the orchestra on the double bass. (His initial renown, in the early 1960s, was as a jazz bassist.)

The première of Anyone Can See I Love You, tentatively scheduled for early 2012, will probably take place in Victoria (perhaps Vancouver), but the work will not remain a local phenomenon for long, given that Bryars is among the most celebrated and popular composers working today. (Recordings of his best-known works, like Jesus's Blood Never Failed Me Yet, have sold in the hundreds of thousands ) Already generating interest from major musical organizations in North America and England, the new opera is sure to enjoy a long and widespread career.

Stay tuned.

© Copyright (c) The Victoria Times Colonist

Festival Clubs Fine Print

Thursday, June 10, 2010 - 9:00 pm

The Club, Theatre Complex
Tickets: $10

The Faroese singer songwriter - this summer's Marilyn Monroe - brings her otherworldly voice to Banff's own island of song.

Festival Clubs Fine Print

• Ticket sales close a 1/2 hour after the performance start time (subject to availability).

• The Club is a licensed venue and admits those 14 and older.

• Happy Hour prices are in effect!

Marilyn Monroe opera to debut in Banff

Eivor, who sings the role of Marilyn Monroe, is shown in rehearsal with British singer Richard Morris. (Laura Vanags/Banff Centre for the Arts)

Anyone Can See I Love You, a small-scale opera about the last days of Marilyn Monroe, gets its first workshop performance in Banff this weekend, with a performance by Faroese singer Eivor.

The work is being composed by Gavin Bryars, a U.K.-born, B.C.-based composer who has straddled the pop and classical worlds, beginning his music career with the likes of John Cage and Brian Eno and now well-known for his chamber and new classical music.

Monroe herself was in Banff in 1953 to shoot River of No Return. The blond bombshell actress went through a series of husbands and lovers before dying in 1962 of a drug overdose, an apparent suicide.

Bryars told CBC News he had only a layman's view of Monroe until he read the poetry of Marilyn Bowering, the Canadian poet.

"Marilyn [Bowering] was a neighbour on Vancouver Island, a novelist and she gave me a volume of her poetry, Anyone Can See I Love You and some of the poems deal with Marilyn [Monroe]," Bryars recalled. "It seemed to me there was material there for a chamber opera."

Anyone Can See I Love You had been made into a radio play by BBC Scotland, a play Bryars found "terrific."

"I liked the idea of doing something that is almost a kind of a solo piece — that spotlights just one person for the whole opera," Bryars said.

"I was also attracted by the idea of chamber opera. I've done three large-scale full evening operas. They're terrific, it's great, but they're a huge amount of work for very little reward at the end. You have five or six performances … but you spend a couple of years writing."

Bryars' full-length operas include G, Doctor Ox's Experiment and Medea.

Composer Gavin Bryars, back, performs with members of Aventa at the Banff Centre for the Arts. (Laura Vanags/Banff Centre for the Arts)

Bryars said he works frequently with small groups in the U.K., including Opera North, which is always looking for smaller-scale, more portable operas.

He worked out the libretto with Bowering, who is at Banff to help with the piece as it emerges. He's been working feverishly on the score and has about half an hour of music, enough for two scenes of the opera, now completed. He is planning a one-act work of about 75 minutes, with a small cast and simple staging.

In this workshop production, a single singer, British baritone Richard Morris, plays three of the men in Monroe's life.

Bryars' first choice to play Marilyn was Eivor, a Faro Islands singer with an otherworldly voice with whom he's worked previously. She jumped at the chance to come to Banff.

"I decided we would not have a kind of operatic voice for Marilyn herself. We wanted someone who was able to sing in a quite intimate way almost internally as if singing into a microphone," Bryars said.

"She's a very versatile singer. A lot of the material she sings is folk material. She sings with a minimum amount of vibrato — it's a kind of pure early music kind of voice. But she does have classical training … and she has a big range."

Bryars said his mainly operatic score will incorporate some of the jazz and pop sounds of the 1950s and '60s. Monroe herself sang songs such Anyone can See I Love You, Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend and I Fall In Love Too Easily, but the rights to such properties are too expensive for a small production, he said.

Rare opportunity

The Victoria, B.C.-based new music ensemble Aventa is to play and will work with Bryars over the next year as the full opera emerges.

The period in Banff is a rare opportunity to have uninterrupted time for the composer, who juggles commissions in North America and Europe with family life in Vancouver Island and the U.K.

His next commission is music for a ballet by Edouard Locke's La La La Human Steps.

"I started out as a philosophy student and a jazz bass player, not a composer, so a lot of connections I make are from thinking in a slightly more oblique way," Bryars said.

"I used to have a rule that I would say yes to any project, then work out how on earth I could possibly do it. That way I find myself in very interesting company."

Anyone Can See I Love You will be performed Saturday evening in Banff, along with Bryars' 1969 composition, The Sinking of the Titanic. It will be performed in Vancouver and Victoria in 2012.

Link for this post: http://www.cbc.ca/arts/music/story/2010/06/10/marilyn-monroe-opera.html?ref=rss

Eivør interpretará Marilyn Monroe numa Ópera

Eivør estreará uma ópera do compositor britânico Gavin Bryars, entitulada "Marilyn the Opera", baseada no livro da autora canadense Marilyn Bowering chamado "Anyone can see I love you" (título também de uma canção interpretada pela jovem Marilyn) que tem data já marcada para este sábado, 12 de junho, no Margaret Greenham Theatre em Banff, Alberta, Canadá. O papel de Marilyn será interpretado pela Eivør, em duas grandes cenas de

palco.