As I write, there's just one week to go until the world premiere of this extraordinary new opera by Dutch composer Michel van der Aa. It was a great moment transferring to the Barbican theatre last week after a month of rehearsals at 3 Mills Studios right by the Olympic stadium in east London. English National Opera has a lot of experience in producing and presenting opera – especially contemporary ones – in spaces other than its magnificent home, thereby forcing new perspectives and connotations. Here at the Barbican I think it has got it spot on – the production looks great and fits the space of the theatre beautifully.
3D film projection has, as far as I'm aware, not been used in opera before, and certainly not in this integrated way – in Sunken Garden it's central to the plot. Also new to my experience of working in opera is having the work's composer also direct the production, as Michel van der Aa is doing.
From the very outset, Michel has imagined all aspects of his new music theatre piece as a whole. The musical elements inform his visual ideas and vice versa. I've loved working with a director who knows every note, every dramatic turn of the score, let alone every detail of the story. Michel – an inspired composer who happens to be a technical whizz-kid – also knows all the different media he works with inside out, commands them technically and completely, which means he can put these means to the absolute service of music and drama.
His music is scored for an orchestra of strings, four winds and percussion. It's a mix of the lyrically operatic, modern, urban angular (listen out for a couple of dance tracks when the film becomes music-video) and purely cinematic in terms of the beautiful soundscapes it creates.
As conductor, I've got the challenge of perfecting the combination of live orchestra, pre-recorded electronics and film, as well as live singers with the singers on screen. And, the co-ordination of the film issues aside, there's also the otherworldliness of electronic sounds and echoes (which symbolise the transcendental quality of the subject matter) to fuse with the live orchestral playing to the conscious point of indiscernability.
The film sequences feature two pre-recorded singers who at one point – it feels the emotional apex of the whole piece – form a miraculous ensemble with the three live singers on stage, coming together in a seemingly conventional operatic quintet. To conduct this, I have a click-track attached to the film's soundtrack which I can hear through an ear-piece, but the live singers don't hear this, and they've had to learn to sing with the "holograms" and watch me, very very intently!
Sunken Garden reminds me of a similar experience I had with another music project involving film: accompanying a screening of Kubrick's 2001 A Space Odyssey with a live orchestra. There, too, I had to match and enhance the flow and editing of a film sequence with its musical underscoring. It taught me how to find musical freedom and expression even when having to adhere to a very set framework and timing, and about the thrill of making these different artforms fuse to create something that is more than the sum of its parts. It gives a new level and meaning to the operatic concept "Gesamtkunstwerk" – which is exactly what Sunken Garden is about.
Sunken Garden is at the Barbican theatre, London, from 12-20 April. The Guardian is media partner for this production and is offering reduced price tickets to its readers. Click here for details
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