The label Disquiet has released the record version of “Upload”, the penultimate opera by Dutch composer Michel van der Aa.

Dutchman Michel van der Aa is perhaps the most prominent of the current Dutch composers. He has received almost every major award in the small central European country and the National Opera loves to knock on his door to premiere operas and Upload, now released on record through Disquiet -founded in 2010 by Van der Aa himself- is his penultimate work in this field, premiered in July 2021 at the Bregenz Festival in Austria.

To define Van der Aa as a composer is to be terse… In Upload he also wrote the libretto, was in charge of stage direction and directed the film version which can be seen on medici.tv. Van der Aa, in fact, is always exploring the new possibilities offered by technology, both in the musical composition – which mixes conventional acoustic instruments with electronics – and in the scenic narrative of some of his works, in which he incorporates video: in 2012 he premiered another film opera, Sunket Garden. In Upload – which received the International Opera Prize in the category “Digital Opera”, awarded on 28 November at the Teatro Real in Madrid – everything goes a step further, including the theme of the opera, in which he examines our relationship with technology, mortality and identity, through the story of a father (baritone Roderick Williams) who, in order to “be there” for his daughter (soprano Julia Bullock) after her inevitable death, has her thoughts and memories “uploaded” to achieve a “virtual resurrection”. Throughout the opera, the score shifts between electronic and acoustic sounds (the latter by MusikFabrik conducted by Otto Tausk), just as the staging moves between live performance, pre-recorded scenes and motion-capture technology. Given that Upload can at times be reminiscent of the fondly remembered and disturbing TV series Black Mirror, the score at times feels like a soundtrack, which also conveys unease and excitement, with the nervous pulse of strings, chaotic-looking percussion and electronics turned into crackling white noise. All this, however, takes on a different tone in the scenes involving the “supposed” father-daughter dialogue, a role played, as has already been said, by Julia Bullock, who is fast becoming one of the great operatic sopranos of the 21st century. And she is, in part, thanks to projects like this one, which is also destined to be one of the important titles of our era… at least until the subject of which she speaks has been overtaken by reality as Artificial Intelligence or the metaverse turn it into a relic of the past…