Annette Vande Gorne, Werner Lambersy

Yawar Fiesta is an electroacoustic opera by Annette Vande Gorne on a libretto by the Belgian poet Werner Lambersy, realized between 2006 and 2012 at the Métamorphoses d’Orphée studio of Musiques & Recherches in Ohain and premiered on 28 October 2012 at the 19th L’Espace du son festival in Brussels. Composed for 7.1 channels and dedicated to Francis Dhomont, it runs for 87 minutes in two acts and a final monologue.

The libretto, written in the late 1990s, takes its name from the Blood Day (yawar fiesta in Quechua) held each year in Andean villages founded by the Spanish, when a condor captured by Amerindians in the mountains is pitted against a bull raised by the villagers. Lambersy gives it the incantatory form of an ancient Greek tragedy and reads in the fight other duels: being against having, poverty against wealth, rulers against ruled. Act I, Condor (La veillée), is carried by the calm bass of the Amerindian chief and the lament of a women’s choir; Act II, Taureau (Le défi), by the incisive tenor of Western society and a choir of bourgeois women; the Monologue final sets two contradictory inner voices against each other.

No singer appears on stage. The voices were recorded in the studio as improvisations under the composer’s direction and then transformed, and each spatial movement across the loudspeakers is tied to a character, an action or an affect. Vande Gorne’s stated aim is to show that space is a musical parameter on a par with pitch, duration, dynamics and timbre. The singers include Lorenzo Carola, Paul Alexandre Dubois, Madiha Figuigui, Nicolas Ischerwood and Françoise Vanhecke, with Charles Kleinberg and Lambersy himself as narrators and the composer singing contralto.

Born in Charleroi in 1946, Annette Vande Gorne studied with Guy Reibel and Pierre Schaeffer in Paris after discovering acousmatics through François Bayle and Pierre Henry. In 1982 she founded Musiques & Recherches and later the festival L’Espace du son with its 60-loudspeaker acousmonium. Lambersy (1941-2021), born in Antwerp, published about 40 volumes of poetry.

Blu-ray Audio (BD-R) in OGplus, empreintes DIGITALes IMED 17142, 2017.