The director Anna-Sophie Weber develops a criminal opera collage and stages the production together with director David Hermann. It is a surreal spectacle taking place in Saigon during the 1940s and connects Vietnamese with German culture through its content and aesthetics.
“Yesterday’s Memory – an opera of crime” is a cooperation between the Ho Chi Minh City Ballet Symphony Orchestra and Opera (HBSO) and the Goethe-Institut.
 
"Yesterday’s Memory" describes the nightmarish struggle of the inspector Jonny M. to investigate and solve the strange murder of a singer at the opera house in Ho Chi Minh City. But this case is different from all previous ones. The ghost of the corpse repeatedly comes to the attention of the inspector and terrorizes him. Soon the boundaries between reality and dream, truth and lie, play and madness can no longer be defined. Jonny M. finds himself trapped in a web of emotional entanglements from where there is no escape.

In the implied film noir aesthetics of the 1940s, a trapping game begins between the suspects and the inspector and thus also a race against time, because in the end he has to name the perpetrator in court.
 
Anna-Sophie Weber uses a musical repertoire of arias, duets and choral passages by well-known German composers, including Bach, Mozart and Beethoven, and interweaved them thematically with the overall plot.

In the performance, the dialogues are spoken in Vietnamese, the music numbers sung in German. This bilingualism makes it possible to understand the content, no matter which of the two languages one speaks.
 
David Hermann has established himself over the last few years as one of the leading directors of his generation in the field of opera and theatre. He studied in Berlin and won the first prize at the international competition for directing and stage design in Graz.

The young director Anna-Sophie Weber also studied in Berlin and understands her work as an interface between the free scene and classical music theatre. Besides classical opera stagings, she has worked on several cross-genre plays.

The musical director is the Vietnamese conductor Tran Nhat Minh. In the rehearsals he receives support from the conductor Askan Geisler. He is also a conductor and répétiteur at the Musiktheater Gelsenkirchen and conducted various opera productions.

The costumes are designed by the Vietnamese designer Quynh Paris. Soloists of the ensemble, singers of the Opera choir and the Ho Chi Minh City Symphony Orchestra participate in the performance.

Admission fee: 900.000 – 750.000 – 600.000 – 450.000 – 150.000 VND (student area)
Online: ticketbox.vn/HBSO
 
Details
Price: 900.000 – 750.000 – 600.000 – 450.000 – 150.000 VND (student area)
ticketbox.vn/HBSO
 +84 28 38326716 – 14
Lan.Nguyenthiphuong@goethe.de

Visit Goethe-Institut’s website for more information: www.goethe.de