Awakening

A company of actors present Siddhartha Gautama’s path to becoming Buddha. There’s no theatre, just a bare room without a stage. In the centre, a space where the actors step into their roles. The performance takes its course, with the actor playing Gautama merging more and more with Buddha. Then a funeral procession interrupts the performance. The boundaries between theatre and reality begin to blur. Bombs fall, war rages. With war comes death – from which not even Buddha himself is immune. But when all hope seems to have been extinguished, the Buddha’s stories remain; and they to teach us the only way out of suffering is awakening.

The multi-award-winning composer Param Vir has become an integral part of the contemporary music scene. Born in Delhi into a family that cultivated the heritage of Indian classical music, he moved to London at the age of 34 to study composition with Peter Maxwell-Davies and Oliver Knussen, among others. Recent works include a much-acclaimed BBC Proms commission Cave of Luminous Mind and Raga Fields for sarod and large ensemble which toured internationally. In his music, Param Vir combines western and eastern aesthetics and creates unique, transcendental soundscapes. This style characterises AWAKENING, a heartfelt work which he composed for Theater Bonn.

The libretto for this piece was written by one of the most renowned British playwrights and authors of our time, David Rudkin, who worked on this text for over 30 years. His first joint opera with Param Vir, the one-act THE BROKEN STRINGS, which is based on a Buddhist parable, was commissioned by the Munich Biennale in 1990 and was directed by Pierre Audi. In a career spanning over sixty years, he has had the privilege of working with some legendary personalities - including film directors François Truffaut and Fred Zinnemann as well as theater directors Peter Hall and Peter Brook.

For the world premiere of AWAKENING, he has Vasily Barkhatov at his side, one of the most sought-after directors in opera. Barkhatov has already thrilled audiences in Bonn with his productions of Umberto Giordano’s SIBERIA and Peter Tchaikovsky’s EUGEN ONEGIN.