The generosity of Peter Sellars

“Opera is always eccentric, an unusual angle on the world - which I deeply love and respect.”

Peter Sellars

A few days before New Zealand’s COVID-19 lockdown I travelled to Auckland for what was, as I write, the most recent live performance I’ve attended. The impact of that evening at Auckland Arts Festival, a single New Zealand performance of director Peter Sellars’ theatrical interpretation of Orlando di Lasso’s Lagrime di San Pietro, has stayed with me; a combination of sophisticated seven-part Renaissance polyphony with contemporary staging of raw passion, telling the biblical story of Peter’s betrayal of Jesus and the lifelong emotional pain that followed.

The twenty-one singers of the Los Angeles Master Chorale have been working with Sellars and their music director Grant Gershon on Flemish composer di Lasso’s last masterpiece for several years, memorizing the 90-minute work and Sellars’ intense staging and movement. Throughout the production, his genuine commitment to the music was evident.

Sellars brought his legendary artistic generosity to New Zealand earlier this year with this production and before it a residency at the New Zealand Festival. This genial and smiling man, arguably one of the busiest artists in the western world, based himself in Wellington for two weeks.  A major player in the youth-oriented Te Ata Festival in Porirua that preceded the NZ Festival, collaborating with the young dancers of FLEXN, he then joined Talanoa Mau, a conference designed by Festival guest curator Lemi Ponifasio.  A week later, Sellars presented his astonishing production of Claude Vivier’s opera Kopernikus to Wellington audiences.

French Canadian Vivier’s opera, subtitled Opéra – ritual de mort, is an eccentric exploration of death and the afterlife, with links to Mozart’s Magic Flute and Wagner’s Tristan. Audiences were a little mystified by the static ritual but many responded warmly to the sheer beauty of the music and the staggeringly fine performance by the vocal ensemble Roomful of Teeth and instrumentalists of Ensemble L’Instant Donné.

As with Lagrime di San Pietro, Sellars brought profound sincerity and imagination to the production of Kopernikus and to what he describes as Vivier’s “visionary world to come”.  The work of this iconoclastic director is deeply humanitarian in intention - and shining through it all is his belief that artists can change the world. Such thinking has never seemed more important.

For more about Kopernikus,  Lagrime and this innovative director, read my recent profile of Peter Sellars.