Dutch composer Louis Andriessen's new work, Theatre of the World, received its world premiere in performances by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, led by Reinbert de Leeuw, at Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles this past Friday night and Sunday afternoon. The piece, which Andriessen considers a "a grotesque stagework in nine scenes," explores the life of 17th-century Jesuit polymath Athanasius Kircher, with a libretto by Helmut Krausser. The multimedia production, directed by Pierre Audi and featuring décor and video by stop-motion animators the Quay Brothers, will receive its European premiere at Theater Carré in Amsterdam, with de Leeuw conducting the Dutch National Opera, June 11–19; for tickets, visit operaballet.nl.

"My music generally travels freely through history suggesting allusions to drive the drama," Andriessen says in an interview with his publisher, Boosey & Hawkes. "It is rather like pulling books or scores off my shelf at home when I think of possible connections. Many references are ironic and serve a particular point, but generally the overall sweep of the music ... is intended to provide a jostling, surreal, Bosch-like world summed up in the work's description as 'a Grotesque.'"

The New York Times music critic Zachary Woolfe, in his review of the weekend's premiere in Los Angeles, says: "Theater of the World is a lavish, bawdy, enthusiastically semi-coherent fantasia on early modern culture, [and] Mr. Andriessen has grown ever more expert as a technician. While eclecticism is now the compositional norm (much more so than when he was first experimenting with bold stylistic mixtures in the 1960s and '70s), Mr. Andriessen was there first, and he still does it best."

Nonesuch Records released Andriessen's latest opera, La Commedia, in 2014. The Washington Post calls the Grawemeyer Award–winning piece "an exciting, powerful and rich piece that shows Andriessen at the top of his game." The Los Angeles Times considers it "the greatest opera of the century so far."