DEVIN TOWNSEND Performs His Rock Opera 'The Moth' Live For First Time In Groningen, Netherlands
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Visionary musician, composer, and producer Devin Townsend performed his rock opera "The Moth" live for the first time on Thursday, March 27 together with the Noord Nederlands Orkest (North Netherlands Symphony Orchestra) symphony orchestra at De Oosterpoort in Groningen, Netherlands. A second performance of "The Moth" will take place tonight (Friday, March 28) at the same venue.
Fan-filmed video of the March 27 concert can be seen here.
This show is exclusive and is only being performed in Groningen; it will not be staged anywhere else in the world.
Townsend is renowned for his groundbreaking fusion of metal, progressive rock, and ambient music. With a career spanning more than 30 years, he has pushed the boundaries of musical genres and collaborated with world-famous orchestras, establishing an unparalleled artistic legacy.
For his latest project, he has teamed up with the Noord Nederlands Orkest and composed "The Moth", a "rock opera" he has been working on for years, which represents his lifelong ambition. "The Moth" tells the story of the human experience from birth to death, comparable to the transformation of a caterpillar into a moth. It symbolizes the human quest for meaning and offers perspectives on the fear of death through analogy and narrative. Ever since Townsend witnessed large musicals such as "Jesus Christ Superstar" and "Phantom Of The Opera" in the 1970s, he has seen this project as his calling.
"The Moth" has been in the making for over a decade, and Townsend has been building towards it for 30 years. Now, he has shared the stage at De Oosterpoort in Groningen with no less than seventy musicians from the Noord Nederlands Orkest, a sixty-member choir, and his own band, which includes Mike Keneally, Joseph Stephenson, Darby Todd and James Leach.
In a recent video message, Devin stated about "The Moth": "I have been working on this for ten years.
"Now let me tell you how it started. I had to start by figuring out, I had to start taking classes. 'Cause when I was a teen, when I was a kid, my dream was always to make sort of a modern opera, in a way, with modern themes, modern instrumentation, and a lot of the things that I had been fascinated by in my youth — 'Phantom Of The Opera', 'Jesus Christ Superstar', 'Paint Your Wagon', all those sorts of things, were really impactful to me as a youth because the emotions were so broad that it was easy for me to understand. It's always very obvious when you're watching these sorts of things when something is happy, when something is sad. And I had to start from the very beginning, 10 years ago, learning how to write, how to navigate the logistics of and how to deliver on time an opera, I guess, in some sense. Starting with I had to take lessons in composition, because although I know how to write music, of course, I never knew theory. So when I was working with orchestras, for example, with smaller projects like 'Deconstruction' or even the one in Bulgaria. I had to learn the language so I wasn't wasting time because it's so expensive to work with these choirs and orchestras. So, I started taking lessons about 10 years ago. And I finally figured out how I could pull off making this uncompromised musical statement with hundreds of people — creatively no boundaries, nobody telling me what to do. The only way I could do that was to do it myself. So, my friends, I've invested everything I have into making 'The Moth', into making this facility so I could make 'The Moth', in order to get the best players, in order to get the best orchestras, in order to get the best artists.
"For much of my life I've been wanting to do these things, which is such epic scale, but then whenever I say to somebody, like, 'Hey, this is what I want,' they said, 'Well, STRAPPING YOUNG LAD' or 'you're a heavy metal musician,'" he continued. "And up to this point, there's been a lot of doubting that my capacity to not only pull it off musically, but also logistically — it requires a certain type of mentality, I believe. And so in the beginning, when I was proposing making operas and making these kind of heavy metal, crazy orchestral things, the reaction to that from people was, 'Well, we don't feel that you are capable of doing that,' or, 'We don't feel like you're ready to do that', or, 'It requires a level of expertise specific to this type of musical vocation to pull it off, which you don't have. Therefore, if you wanna do it, you have to hire somebody for exorbitant amounts of money.' So, I said, 'Fuck it,' and I put together a team of about 12 people, and I have funded it independently from the very beginning to the very end.
"North Netherlands National Symphony And Choir … proposed this to me about three years ago. They said, 'Listen, if you're serious about this, we're one of the most elite orchestras in Europe. And if you're serious about it, we're willing to take a chance on your vision.' And so I said, 'Let's do it.' And I built a place to make 'The Moth'. I put together teams so I can delegate each aspect of it — choirs go to this team, orchestra goes to this team, scoring goes to this team, orchestrating goes to this team, the band themselves. Everything needed to be sort of logistically set up ahead of time so that you could have a strategy about it. Because, for example, trying to deliver the choir parts in a timely fashion, the way that it ended up happening is the choir required the delivery of their musical scores prior to the orchestra. And the orchestra needed to get it prior to the band getting it. So I had to write the music with teams in different locations at different times, and it's almost like concurrently five jigsaw puzzles. And the hope is that when they're all together, it will create the vision that I've been following for so long".
(Source: www.blabbermouth.net)
