Dementia
© Mariana Tirantte
Text
- (…) This writer-and-translator couple will be visited by versions of themselves twenty-five and fifty years older. Strasnoy’s music teaches us that perhaps it doesn’t matter so much whether she finishes the novel she needs to write, nor does it matter to clear up what happened with the maid who loitered around the house in the first scene. The plot is not about solving an enigma or finishing a task, but about the temporal thickness in which all of this could happen. Music creates a way of narrating and, therefore, a way of ordering time. And also of inhabiting its disorder. It does not suppress narration. It gives it a new potential, outside of or beyond all consecutive action. Because if at first glance Dementia seems to be an opera about the passage of time, maturity, and the years, it later reveals something very different: a before and an after that coexist. Not so much the development of a life, its progressive advancement, its achievements or failures, its more or less slow decline, but rather the direct presentation of time, where sequence becomes simultaneous. (…) the entire narrative power of Strasnoy’s music emerges from the encounter between different styles. His musical pointillism allows us to hear each note on its own, like a tiny dot of color, while simultaneously hearing the larger plot it integrates and weaves together. The same happens with instrumental solos that constantly stand out from the orchestra, yet without detaching completely or taking center stage to the detriment of the rest — as if the orchestral fabric were a background that becomes the figure, or a figure that becomes the background, in infinite mutation. (...) [Dementia] does not move us; it captivates. It does not touch us; it unsettles. Like the writer and her translator, we are immersed in something seemingly ordinary, but in which our future is at stake. Our consecration and our failure. Perhaps the tragic part — and also the comic part — is that for the characters of Dementia, meeting their failed (or consecrated, it is the same) versions will not change their actions; it will only lead them to the conclusion that their destiny is already written, or rather, that it is already badly translated. "We are bad translations of ourselves," they sing toward the end. And what else could we be? What else could we do? /// Victoria Coccaro, Revista Otra Parte
- (…) What is remarkable about Dementia is that, even when moving through fantastical territories, it always maintains a horizon of plausibility. Everything turns out to be strange, even absurd at times, but never arbitrary. The work’s internal logic imposes itself with an unsettling naturalness. (…) Musically, Strasnoy once again demonstrates an exceptional mastery of the stage. The score avoids any archaeological temptation regarding operatic tradition. The harpsichord, used to accompany some of the brief recitatives, coexists with an electric guitar, an organ, and a saxophone, featuring certain timbral twists whose colors occasionally recall the aesthetics of film noir, especially in the first scene. There is a central mystery — the disappearance of the maid and the possibility of a crime that is never cleared up — which is never fully resolved. Toward the end, contradictory versions of the events unfold one after another. (…) The instrumental writing does not simply accompany the action: it comments on it or contradicts it, and sometimes anticipates it. In some passages, a parsimonious sonority dominates, sustained by percussion and delicate timbral shifts. In others, the accumulation of layers produces a progressive acceleration that reflects the growth of the madness on stage. /// Laura Novoa, Clarín
Press