Soundstreams’ innovative opera The Garden of Vanished Pleasures, based on the life and texts of artist and activist Derek Jarman, will have its on stage world premiere April 25 to 27, 2025. The work, with music by Cecilia Livingston and Donna McKevitt, using excerpts of Jarman’s own journals, first saw the light of day as a digital opera in 2021.
The digital original was a finalist for Opera America’s 2022 Award for Excellence in Digital Opera, and was showcased at Opera America 2024 New Works Forum.
Derek Jarman
“The gardener digs in another time, without past or future, beginning or end. A time that does not cleave the day with rush hours, lunch breaks, the last bus home. As you walk in the garden you pass into this time — the moment of entering can never be remembered. Around you the landscape lies transfigured. Here is the Amen beyond the prayer.” (Derek Jarman, taken from his Modern Nature, a published version of his diairies.)
An artist, filmmaker, and queer rights activist, Derek Jarman spent the last years of his life in the bucolic scenery of a property called Prospect Cottage on England’s southwest coast.
Jarman was born in 1942 in Northwood, UK, and studied English and art at King’s College London. He’d follow up with four years of study at the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London.
His first break professionally came via set design. Jarman worked on a film by Ken Russell, among others, and got interested in experimental super 8mm shorts. It would be a medium he’d continue to explore for several years to come.
Derek made his first feature film in 1976, Sebastiane, followed by Jubilee in 1977. The films, which dealt with gay eroticism and punk culture, made him an underground hero. His typically unconventional adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1979) further established his indie credentials as not only an artist and filmmaker, but gay rights activist. For a mainstream audience, probably his best known film is 1986’s Caravaggio, a fictionalized biopic of the Baroque painter.
Even as the film was celebrated, however, Jarman was also being diagnosed with AIDS. Faced with what was then a death sentence, and one that was simultaneously taking the lives of many of his friends, he retreated to Dungeness, Kent, where he owned a property called Prospect Cottage.
There, he continued to work, producing among other things his acclaimed film Blue, which was released in 1993, just four months before his death in 1994.
He also kept a journal, and importantly, tended the garden of his beautiful property. It would be in that garden that he found a kind of solace, and even hope, against the harsh realities he faced.
Garden of Vanished Pleasures
Garden of Vanished Pleasures is a staged song cycle. Rather than telling a linear story, the cycle expresses an emotional journey. The work was conceived and devised by U.K./Canadian director Tim Albery. In the UK, Albery has directed productions for Opera North, the English National Opera, and Scottish Opera, among others. He first worked with Soundstreams in 2019 on Hell’s Fury, which was presented as part of Luminato.
Cecilia Livingston and Donna McKevitt have composed the songs of love, loss, and longing, anger over an unjust society, and much more. While Jarman’s story is personal, it speaks of universal emotions and themes.
The cast includes countertenor Daniel Cabena as Derek Jarman, with sopranos Mireille Asselin and Danika Lorèn, and mezzo-soprano Hillary Tufford. Music will be performed by Brenna Hardy-Kavanagh on viola, Amahl Arulanandam on cello, and music director Hyejin Kwon at the piano. Many of the performers, including Cabena, were involved in the original video production.
Albery’s signature design aesthetic is stark and striking, with video projections by Michelle Tracey that add atmosphere.
- Find more details about the performances on April 25, 26 and 27 [HERE].
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