(…) To be on the safe side I had brought with me an expert commentator, Henrik, age 8. However, his comments were extremely brief. Everything was good. Nothing was boring.
In the second act Gustav becomes deeply enamoured of the parrot and they experience a happy ending. It strikes me that opera people, who are used to writing and performing for adults, believe that children need to constantly receive new impressions.
Carl Unander-Scharin’s children’s opera “Loranga, Masarin och Dartanjang”, based on Barbro Lindgren’s books, is a successful combination of absurd 1970s theatre, a musical, and a traditional opera, in which the boundaries have been erased and adapted to an audience of children.
Barbro Lindgren’s classic children’s book “Loranga, Masarin och Dartanjang”, which has previously been turned into both a play and an animated film, is the basis of this operatic creation with music by Carl Unander-Scharin.
The audience at the premiere seems to have been well read, and the pleasure of recognition spread and was contagious. The most clear-spoken performers had also been chosen, in the knowledge that the first complaint of an audience that includes lots of children is that one can’t make out the words.
The music is the most enjoyable part of the Royal Swedish Opera’s family opera, “Loranga, Masarin och Dartanjang”.
En uppsättning kromatiska biltutor kan liva upp det mesta. Carl Unander-Scharins klatschiga “Bilhornsfugato” ur familjeoperan “Loranga, Mazarin och Dartanjang” var dessutom en finurlig blinkning till uvertyren i György Ligetis anti-anti-opera “Den stora makabern”.
This is a performance filled with pranks and nonsense, completely in line with the two almost anarchistic books. It is as if the two (C-)Karls have really found each other. What one of them has written in the music, the other has reinforced and played with, and this means that the distance between the stage, orchestra pit and concert hall is dissolved many, many times.
With his new children's opera, Loranga, Masaring och Dartanjang, at the Royal Opera in Stockholm, composer (and tenor) Carl Unander-Scharin showed a young audience the importance of art as a forum where boundaries can be stretched. Swedish author Barbro Lindgren created the libretto for the opera, based on some of her own popular books for children written in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
It has definitely been as playful at the Royal Swedish Opera before this – but surely there has rarely been seen so many happy and pleasant police officers. And never such well-dressed ones.