"In Amsterdam, the big friendly wolf of Vasco Mendonça"

Laurent Vilarem | Opera Online, 18.10.22

"What if we had fun rewriting the tales of our childhood? In Little Red Riding Hood, the wolf appears as a terrible predator and the child as a fragile and threatened being. What if we reversed the roles?

This is the mission that Portuguese composer Vasco Mendonça (one of his country's most important) and librettist Gonçalo M. Tavares (a great Portuguese-speaking writer who has been translated worldwide) set themselves in their opera The Little Girl, the Hunter and the Wolf, which premiered at the Amsterdam Opera House. This is a work for children: the hall is full of little blonde heads (sometimes under five) and there is a relative calm before the performance begins.

The story is beautiful: the wolf meets two little pigs but is wounded by a hunter. If he howls, it's because he's hungry: it's in his nature. If he scares people, he regrets it: he is considered a monster because he is different. He meets a young girl with whom he manages to establish a bond. The wolf wants to go to the moon "where there are no more hunters", but unfortunately a hunter finds him. And in the house of the little girl where he has taken refuge, it is finally the hunter who is in the bed to kill him!

It is difficult to know what the children present at the performance thought. One would have thought that they were frightened by the howling of the wounded wolf, especially as the show confronts certain episodes of violence head on. But psychoanalysts have long shown that this intensity is inherent in the cathartic effect of stories. With the exception of one very young child (who will leave at the very beginning of the performance), all the young spectators remain very calm, their eyes fixed on the stage.

Inne Goris' staging is very ingenious. A rectangle covered with leaves makes the objects necessary for the action, such as a door or a tree, appear in a poetic way. Lotte Boonstra's costumes are delightful: the girl's jacket is a bright red, the little pigs have a corkscrew tail, and the wolf's fur on the singer's head is glaringly real. There is a lot of humanity and mischief in the interactions between the characters. The singers are wonderfully suited to their roles: Arturo den Hartog's wolf has not a bass voice as one might have expected, but a countertenor voice (which admittedly lacks a little power). Leonie van Rheden is a very good hunter, but it is Sabra El Bahri-Khatri who lights up the stage in the brilliant role of the girl/red riding hood.

Musically, Vasco Mendonça chose an original formation. The Spectra ensemble is located at the back of the stage and consists of a cello, a clarinet, an electric guitar and a percussion set. With its short rhythmic loops, one is reminded of American minimalism, especially Steve Reich, and even of the music of Louis Andriessen, especially since Mendonça does not soften his instrumental palette. There is a kind of darkness in this opera for children, combined with some very melancholy moments. The little girl, the hunter and the wolf has many elegiac arias in which the characters look at themselves and complain about their condition. Mendonça's lyrical vocal writing includes suspended arias that sound like something out of a John Adams opera or a Broadway musical. The girl's final aria "The World Dances" is the most beautiful poetic achievement of this endearing work.

Because of the many instrumental interludes, the show sometimes seems a little slow, but the strength of Mendonça and Tavares' proposal (as well as the quality of the questions it raises in the children) is such that we hope to see this Young Girl, the Hunter and the Wolf on our French stages again soon."

read original (French) here