Kris Defoort is best known as a jazz musician, but since the turn of the new millennium he has turned his attention more and more to classical projects. The Woman Who Walked Into Doors is his second opera to be recorded (House of the Sleeping Beauties was released in 2009), but it is the first opera he wrote. Originally produced in Antwerp in 2001, it has subsequently received dozens of European performances. The English libretto by Guy Cassiers, the composer, and Marianne van Kerkhoven is based on the grim 1996 novel of ...
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Kris Defoort is best known as a jazz musician, but since the turn of the new millennium he has turned his attention more and more to classical projects. The Woman Who Walked Into Doors is his second opera to be recorded (House of the Sleeping Beauties was released in 2009), but it is the first opera he wrote. Originally produced in Antwerp in 2001, it has subsequently received dozens of European performances. The English libretto by Guy Cassiers, the composer, and Marianne van Kerkhoven is based on the grim 1996 novel of the same name by Irish writer Roddy Doyle. There are probably few other operas so expletive-intensive, and the sexual descriptions are explicit. Set in modern Dublin, the story of the 39-year-old Paula Spencer is practically a compendium of the miseries of contemporary urban poverty -- physical and emotional abuse, addiction, fractured families, hunger, relentless fear, and worst of all a loneliness and sense of alienation that's all the more terrible because of its ordinariness -- the...
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