Return of Kettings Ithaka

Otto Kettings Ithaka is back on stage after nearly forty years. An intriguing opera by a searching artist.

Between Berg and Stravinsky
Composer Otto Ketting (1935-2012) has always had his own place in Dutch musical life. He stood with one leg in the lyricism of the Rotterdam school and with the other in the pulse of the Hague school. Both Alban Berg and Igor Stravinsky inspired him. He was outspoken in his defense of Dutch musical life, which he regularly saw threatened. His opera Ithaka, which opened the new Amsterdam Muziektheater in 1986, was praised for its intriguing music. Massive blocks of sound alternated increasingly throughout the work with introspective solos by soprano, tenor or baritone, with evocative choral sounds and with poignant passages for rarefied strings and brass.

Otto Kettings 'road movie'
The story of Ithaka is based on and inspired by the poem of the same name by the Greek poet Konstantínos Kaváfis. It focuses on Odysseus' existential journey back from the Trojan battlefield to his native island of Ithaca. For Otto Ketting, that too is the road movie of his own life, of an artist displaced in search of a memory of security.