ROH 2013-2014 Linbury Studio Theatre

The Royal Opera House main hall season 2013-2014 is good. The more you delve the more intriguing it gets. Same, too, for the 2013-2014 season in the Linbury Studio Theatre. Real cutting edge stuff coming up, but tried and trusted too. What a pity that the Linbury is too small to accomodate the audience it could attract. Plus, the seating is so cramped that anyone over 40 or 5 foot 6 cannot sit in comfort. Perhaps ROH should be thinking like Nicholas Kenyon at the Barbican, who is outsourcing medium sized events outside the main building.  The Linbury is fine for bijou miniatures, but some of the performances here are important enough, and popular enough, to merit the performance spaces they deserve.

First off : The Wasp Factory, based on Iain Banks's cult novel, with a libretto by David Pountney.  It describes "the disturbing acts of a psychopathic teenager ..... as part of a self-invented warrior cult, he uses a home made apparatus called the Wasp Factory to determine whom he will kill next and how.". Composer and director is Ben Frost.  This is a co-production with Bregenz, Hebbel-am-Ufer, The Holland Festival and the Cork Midsummer Festival, which sounds promising.

Then a really big double bill: Mark-Anthony Turnage's Greek and Salvatorre Sciarrino's The Killing Flower (Luci mie traditrici) which tells the story of  Carlo Gesualdo, artist and murderer.  Sciarrino is one off the biggest names in contemporary music, His music is beautifully poised and magical. Don't let the subject matter deter you any more than the subject matter of George Benjamin's Written on Skin. (reviewed HERE).  Sciarrino is a sensitive and very well informed composer, so it's quite possible the work will be filled with references to Gesualdo's music, interpreted through a modern perspective. Read more about Sciarrino HERE. That's him in the photo above. Cool dude!

Another reason Sciarrino's The Killing Flower should not be missed is that it's being produced by Music Theatre Wales, the innovative company that specializes in interesting new music, like Philip Glass's Into the Penal Colony (reviewed HERE) which Glass liked so much that he's written a new opera specially for them, also based on Kafka. The Trial is in the pipeline for 2015. We're truly lucky that they have an arrangement with ROH. The only other place they're doing this double bill is at the Buxton Festival. The Killing Flower is being paired with Mark-Anthony Turnage's Greek, not in the original production but a relatively new Music Theatre Wales exclusive from 2011.  This is the opera that made Turnage's name when he was an angry young man. Read more about it HERE. Music Theatre Wales is celebrating its 25th anniversary with a good touring programme. More about that HERE. 

For the Christmas/New Year season, a family opera from Julian Philips, whose The Yellow Sofa is a big hit at Glyndebourne Touring Opera. Philips used to be a fixture at the Wigmore Hall, a genuinely erudite and perceptive man, of whom there are far too few. His music is good, too, accessible and stimulating. When he writes for kids he doesn't write "down" at all. This is how you capture the imagination of future audiences : give them good work and all else follows  How the Whale Became, to a libretto by Edward Kemp, is based on Ted Hughes's  The Dreamfighter and Other Creation Tales.

In February, a curiosity, Tippett's King Priam paired with Britten's Paul Bunyan. Tippett and Britten aren't natural bedfellows, and one might say this combines the best of Tippett and worst of Britten.  Anyone familiar with both operas will gasp at the logistics, particularly in a place like the Linbury. There's something so strange about this that a friend suggested that each might be done on different nights, which makes sense, but why do both?  I won't speculate as uninformed guesswork is the enemy of good sense. The English Touring Opera toured with King Priam (on its own) last year.

Luke Bedford's F4u5T sounds like a big departure from his usual style.  It was devised as a companion piece to Gounod's Faust which will be on at the Main House in April 2014, so it might be a humorous experiment rather than a through-composed new opera. Working with electronic sound artist Matthew Herbert, F4u5t is about a composer frustrated by convention, who is seduced by Mefistofeles in the form of a super computer. "Soon he is using his music to manipulate and physically control the world with thrilling but deadly consequences". Probably witty and this time not above the heads of the London press.

ROH is collaborating with the Aldeburgh Music Festival and Opera North for another double bill, featuring as yet un-named operas by Elspeth Brooker and Francisco Coll.  This will be Brooke's biggest ever break. Coll is a protégé of Thomas Adès who calls him "strikingly individual". But the libretto is by Meredith Oakes, so the Adès connection may weigh heavily.

Luca Francesconi's Quartett  will have its UK premiere at the Linbury in June 2014. This is a major work, premiered at the Salzburg Festival  in 2011 and then at Teatro alla Scala, Milan. It was produced by La Fura dels Baus no less.  This will, however, be a completely new production co-produced with the London Sinfonietta  and Opéra de Rouen, directed by ROH Associate Director John Fulljames. That alone guarantees it will be good.  Quartett is loosely based on a play itself based on Choderlos de Laclos' Les Liaisons dangereuses, which isn't a novel so much as a series of letters through which the tightly plotted strategems are revealed. I think it would suit Francesconi, whose chamber music is exqusitely detailed and tightly constructed, The Arditti Quartet champion his work: he's very good indeed. Surprisingly, Tony Pappano is another fan, which ups his street cred no end. Although the opera is as compact as the story, this will be one of the most important new music events in years: the Linbury just doesn't have the capacity to give this opera the space its audience needs.  Why this isn't at Snape or QEH or even Spitalfields, I don't know. It needs only two singers but "a vast symphony orchestra and chorus" plus recorded samples over live music.

Linbury 2013-2014 ends on a fun note with HK Gruber's Gloria - a pigtail. Anyone who knows HK Gruber will know how eclectic his inventions can be, mixing genres with wit and dark humour.  Gloria is the story of "a pig princess looking for love who is dazzled and wooed by a prince who turns out to be a butcher but at the last moment is saved from the chop by Rudi The Wild Boar".   Shades of Gesualdo thru Austrian comic book?  The director will be Frederic Wake-Walker, the production by The Opera Group, Fulljames' original company. Again, their work is so good that this will be a season highlight.  

Luke Bedord Seven Angels full review Linbury BCMG

As promised here is a link to my full, formal review of Luke Bedford's Seven Angels which premiered in Birmingham and reached London on 12th July. I hope this opera will be heard again, in concert form and revived, because it is a lot deeper than most reports might suggest. It's not an "easy" work as it's deliberately ambiguous. Because the climactic scene is the Conference, where authority figures shout platitudes, it's easy to think that that's what the opera is about. But since when did politicians shouting slogans mean what they say ? So beware ! As in life, you can follow slogans or you can think.
photo credit : Alastair Muir

Luke Bedford Seven Angels BCMG London - first thoughts

FULL formal review HERE.   These are/were my first thoughts. What you put into any experience affects what you get out. That's the message of Luke Bedford's Seven Angels and one which audiences should remember too. Don't come expecting Mamma Mia. Seven Angels isn't the musical equivalent of fast food. Instead, it works its way outwards from an inner core of musical depth. A tone poem with voices.Seven Angels is a work by a musician that reveals itself as music taking opera form, just as the angels come to earth to act out characters in a role play. 

Seven Angels is allegory, and like allegory,  it works obliquely through images.  The starting point is John Milton's Paradise Lost but don't make the mistake of expecting a literal, or even literary traverse. There are huge hints in the staging (John Fulljames, The Opera Group). Books everywhere, hundreds of them, and projections behind of pages. Millions of words, some legible, some not. A veritable cacophony of written text.

But what are words, when you think about it? They're just expressive markings for communication, not communication itself. The Prince consumes books, stuffing pages torn straight from their covers, until he looks like he's going to burst. Consume is the operative word. It's only when his plate is empty that he sees himself reflected in the shining metal. Later, members if the Conference gather to discuss the evils of overconsumption at a table made from piles of books. Like the Tower of Babel, it collapses. Words alone are delusion. So listen to Bedford's Seven Angels  as a musical evolution whose secrets are encoded in the orchestration, vocal and instrumental.

Seven Angels starts with a mysteriously opaque murmur that gradually takes shape: a metaphor for the chemical forces that existed before the creation of the universe. Just as the Bible describes Seven Days of Creation, the music moves in plateaux, ideas developing in groups, then moving onwards to new planes. The dark brooding primordial sweep gives way to brightness and sharp, rhythmic ostinato. The pulse is quickening. Very subtle and imaginative musical writing. In fact, I think Seven Angels should be heard in concert performance, to focus on the musical logic. The visuals are extremely important but this is a work that needs to unfold on different levels.  Like George Benjamin's Into the Little Hill, Bedford's Seven Angels needs to be absorbed slowly : it's not at all superficial, and can't be gobbled up in one sitting!

The angels are trying to figure out how the world became the way it is. Instinctively, they recreate the earth's imagined history by acting out the narrative we see on stage. Significantly, they don't know the answers. They're doing role play to stimulate ideas which they don't get from reading books. So, too, the way into Bedford's Seven Angels is intuitive.  Don't get distracted by the earnest allusions to eco-politics and G20 banquets where politicians talk, stuffing themselves while the poor starve. The ranting here comes from the angels pretending to be "politicians". Politcian-speak, words without meaning. You can choose whethervto take it at face value. Seven Angels is a reminder that the real riches of existence aren't to be taken for granted.  The Garden of Eden isn't about apple trees but about deeper values. That's why the tree in this production is paper, a cardboard cut-out that pops out of a book. The real fruit of Seven Angels is the sensitivity you can get from letting it work on your soul.

Musically, Seven Angels is very strong indeed. Small ensemble, but extremely unusual and used in inventivce, creative ways. The piano creates a sort of framework like an inner mertronome over which undulations of low winds and strings palpitate. It feels like the breathing of a living organism. Then, angular agitation, sharp rhythmic ostinato: the organism jerking into action, perhaps. The orchestration is subtle. What is that strange wailing you hear in the second half ? Contrabassoon as solo voice, horribly unsettling, but beautiful in a strange, ethereal way. Very strong integration between vocal and non-vocal forces. The four low violas rumble, a singer snores. The angels stand in line, snapping the pages of books, so the sound becomes another form of percussion. It's remarkably effective, and might be an element of staging that survives into future productions. When the angels return where they came ftrom, the orchestra creates howling concentric patterns of sound, whirring like a clock being wound backwards. Extraordinarily vivid.

This libretto, by Glyn Maxwell, "sings" even on the page, for text that is sung is music, not mere shapes on a page. Bedford translates it extremely sensitively. Each angel is distinctive, and lines can be heard clearly when needed, retreating into the orchestration  as instruments do, when a more diffuse effect is neeeded. No heroic feats of gymnastic singing needed. These angels are feeling their way into human situations.  The lines are semi-conversational, with occasional flights of wild fantasy (the queen in particular - a telling psychological touch). This gives it surprising freedom and must make it a pleasure to sing.  I can imagine what Seven Angels might be like with truly top rank singers, but these communiucate well. It's almost an anachronism to refer to these singers as "cast" because they function as part of the whole orchestration, like the individual musicians of the Birmingham Contemporary Music Ensemble. Nicholas Collon conducts.

For an opera where musical values mean so much, The Opera Group's staging is integral to the production. I specially loved the images of the cosmos, white specks of light flickering in darkness, replicated in filmed projections and in the costumes the singers wear. Star People, yes! Grey jackets, like the ash on the barren desert they visit. Books are lined up in rainbow colours : another image of the Paradise that's been lost. Luke Bedford's Seven Angels is how opera should be done, libretto and staging growing with the music from an early stage. It's an extremely rewarding experience, much more emotionally satisfying than a lot of recent new opera. So what if it's not quick-fix. The finest meals are the ones that nourish, not the ones that come in fancy plastic packaging.(and I don't mean Mark Antony Turnage who's OK)

And exactly as I've said, I've ruminated and read the work over, and have written a much more interesting piece than this ! HERE it is in Opera Today.
Photos copyright Alastair Muir. Christopher Lemmings as The Prince, Rhona McKail as The Waitress, Owen Gilhooly as the General, Keel Watson as The King, Emma Selway as the Queen, Joseph Shovelton as the Industrialist.

Luke Bedford Seven Angels - first glimpse!

Luke Bedford's Seven Angels premieres in Birmingham on 18th June,then tours, and comes to the Linbury, London on 12 July. Anything Bedford writes is an event, because he's one of the best British composers around. He's especially good at writing for voice. Get to it if you can. It sounds intriguing. (My first review is just up HERE)
Opera Today carries a big interview with Bedford about Seven Angels. A scoop - nothing as detailed as this so far. Bedford talks about the opera and its music, and also about its genesis from concept to production. Writing for the stage is different to writing for the concert hall, so read how Bedford goes about doing it. Glyn Maxwell's libretto is so poetic it seems to sing off the page. Director is John Fulljames of The Opera Group. "He has a deep and sensitive understanding of what I'm trying to do", says Bedford.

Since no-one but those involved has yet heard Seven Angels, the Opera Today article is good background. Amazing story..Click on the link, which leads to other links about the production, The Opera Group, BCMG and the Royal Opera House. Below is a a clip courtesy of The Opera group. (Luke Bedford's photo copyright Ben Ealovega)

John Fulljames - why he's Good News for ROH

Exciting  news that John Fulljames has been appointed Associate Director for Opera at the Royal Opera House. He'll be working with Kaspar Holten who becomes Director from September 2011.  Fulljames is a daring, but inspired choice. This is significant news because it might mean a shift towards a more creative approach to opera.

As Anthony Pappano says in the press release, "we're constantly striving to present the very best on our stages". What that may translate to, who knows? But it's better than endless revivals of safe repertoire aimed at the West End market rather than at opera aficionados. I've wriiten about Holten before. Read here about his Copenhagen Ring which is interesting enough to stimulate Wagnerites and accessible enough to engage new audiences. A friernd has also written me about his movie Juan, based on Don Giovanni - more about that soon ! (there's a video clip on this site already, from March).  Fulljames is a daring, brilliant choice because he's close to cutting edge but isn't self indulgent. Look at the photo (Courtesy Johan Persson, BCMG).  Fulljames is looking at the singers while following a score !  

Think on that. In theory, everyone's supposed to work from the score. In practice we get abominations like Monty Python Faust. Fulljames got a First in Physics at Cambridge but all along has also been a musician. He even sang, for a while, so he understands voice. Each production he's made grows from understanding what's unique in whatever opera he's staging. This makes his work so stimulating because he seems to hear things with fresh ears. I adored his George Benjamin Into the Little Hill  last year. Read in detail about it at Aldeburgh and at the Linbury, ROH. Quite detailed description but read it to see why Fulljames's work is such a unique fusion of musical and visual expression. Berlow is a photo of Fulljames and Claire Booth preparing Into the Little Hill.(Courtesy BCMG, Katie Leedale) Again, the score is the star!

Fulljames is currently working on Luke Bedford's new opera Seven Angels with the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group and the Opera Group.  It's Bedford's first opera, eagerly anticiapted because he's perhaps the brightest young hope in British music, and one with a natural gift for writing for voice. Writing for stage is different to writing for the concert hall, so Bedford worked right from the start with Glyn Maxwell the poet. The text is ravishing, and so is what I've heard of the music. BE THERE. Bedford also worked with Fulljames and artist Takamine Tadasu almost from the onset, so the production grows organically from the music. "He has a deep and sensitive understanding of what I'm trying to do", says Bedford.

Fulljames's recent productions for The Opera Group include George Benjamin’s Into the Little Hill, Kurt Weill’s Street Scene, Jonathan Dove’s The Enchanted Pig and Galt MacDermot's Human Comedy (all three with the Young Vic), Elena Langer's The Lion's Face, Varjak Paw, The Shops, Blond Eckbert and Shostakovich The Nose. Street Scene recently won the “Best Musical” award at the Evening Standard Theatre Awards. Recent productions elsewhere include The Excursions of Mr Broucek, Romeo et Juliette and Hansel and Gretel (Opera North), Gianni Schicchi, Zemlinsky Florentine Tragedy and Mavra (Greek National Opera), Von Heute auf Morgen (Lyon) Tobias and the Angel (Young Vic), Nabucco (Opera Holland Park). In 2008, John directed Rimsky-Korsakov’s Snegurochka for Wexford Festival which opened the new opera house in Wexford, Ireland. John’s previous productions in Ireland were Susannah (Wexford) and The Emperor of Atlantis (OTC) both of which won the Best Opera Production Award at the Irish Theatre Awards. He's worked with many of the great directors in Europe and even directed The Ring in Bilbao and Seville.

More detail to follow in an article in Opera Today.

Luke Bedford opera - BCMG 2010/11 season

2010-2011 with the BCMG (Birmingham Contemporary Music Group) looks exciting. Luke Bedford's first opera, Seven Angels, eagerly awaited by all who know how well Bedford writes for voice.

"Seven angels fall through space and time. When they come to rest in a desert landscape they imagine the creation of a legendary garden that once flourished there, and its destruction from greed and neglect". The text, by Glyn Maxwell, is nspired by Paradise Lost. The opera interprets the themes of John Milton’s great epic poem for a modern audience facing the potentially apocalyptic consequences of a changing climate and diminishing resources.

If it is anything like Bedford's Good Dream She has, also inspired by Milton, and adapted by Maxwell, it should be wonderful. Please read more about that by clicking the link. Lots on Bedford on this site!

Featuring seven singers and BCMG players, conducted by Nicholas Collon, Luke Bedford’s music for the opera is "both dark and seductive, tense and lyrical by turns, and integrates solo voices and choral textures", say those who've heard it. If it's anything like Good Dream She Has, wo!

The opera’s post-apocalyptic landscape is realised by Japanese visual artist Tadasu Takamine. Seven Angels is the first collaboration between BCMG and The Opera Group.  They were the team that briought the wonderful George Benjamin Into The Little Hill , so again the prospect looks good. Follow the link and see why.

Seven interesting concerts !. See the BCMG site for more details. Looks like I'm heading for Birmingham on 10th October for Simon Holt, Rolf Hind and Helmut Lachenmann. Lots more coming up - Rebecca Saunders (Visible Traces, read more about her here),  Mark Anthony Turnage, Birtwistle, Morton Feldman, (The viola in my life, a favourite) etc. And Ollie Knussen, too, of course.

Into the Little Hill George Benjamin Linbury 2010

Very loosely based on the fairy tale of the Pied Piper of Hamelin, George Benjamin's Into the Little Hill, now at the Linbury Studio at the Royal Opera House, depicts a conformist community that rats on the piper who rids them of vermin. So he takes their children into a "liitle hill". The one act opera is disturbing because it treats the story as nightmare.

Into the Little Hill operates on many different levels at once. There's a politcial element. The mob violently demand the extermination of all rats, and the Minister sells his principles for votes. There's a suggestion that the rats aren't rats but other humans. As the Child says, they wear clothes and carry suitcases - an echo of the Holocaust? There's social commentary, and the spectre of child abduction, all the more disturbing as the father is implicated.

Nightmares are powerful because they reveal themselves through portents, subliminally working on the subconcious. This is a work that defies classification. Quite likely Benjamin and his librettist Martin Crimp can't explain its full portent, because it operates on the unconscious, on a subliminal level which cold logic cannot reach. That's why it's endlessly intriguing. Perhaps the way to get into Into the Little Hill is to let your intuition lead you.

The Minister's Child appears to her mother in a chink of light."Come home" says the mother. No, says the child, "Our home is under the earth. With the angel under the earth."  What can that mean, no-one knows. But as the child says "The deeper we burrow, the brighter his music burns".  "Can't you see?" cries the child. The child sees, because it doesn't carry the millstone of received wisdom.

Into the Little Hill operates like a half-remembered dream, flotsam flowing out of the unconscious, to be processed in the listener's mind. Rats invade the town, eating  grain and concrete, destroying the foundations of social order, Later, the children disappear into the bowels of the earth. "We're burrowing" sings the child, "streams of hot metal, ribbons of magnesium, particles of light".

A "man with no eyes, no nose, no ears" materializes in the Minister's little daughter's bedroom. He invades the sanctuary, mysteriously, disturbingly. He is powerful because he can breach all defences, even the Minister's office.  "With music I can reach right in /march slaves to the factory/ or patiently unravel the clouds"  Sinister as he is, he's morally neutral - "The choice is yours" he says to the Minister.

The whole opera pivots on ideas of dissimulation, concealment, crawling into dark recesses. Nothing is safe. So the music here is cloaked in disguise. You hear something eerie, or harps or bells. Sure enough, there's a cimbalom right in the heart of the orchestra. You hear something tense, tinny and shrill: it's a banjo, and conventional strings being played like banjos, strings plucked high up the shaft, not bowed. Much emphasis on low-toned instruments like bass flute and bass clarinet, whose sensuous, seductive themes weave through the piece like a narcotic night-blooming flower.

Susan Bickley and Claire Booth sing. The parts aren't defined, as such. Their voices interchange, with each other and with the "voices" in the orchestra, adding to the unsettling, dream like effect. Bickley and Booth are the foremost interpreters on modern music in this country. They are superb. Good as the recording on Nimbus is, the singers there don't come close to Bickley and Booth, who have lived with the piece regularly for some time.

Their expertise matters, because this singing has to be approached with an almost intuitive understanding of how the vocal parts interact with the music. Both are attuned to the inner logic of the piece, so the ever-changing balance flows seamlessly. Although the text is conversational, the syntax is surreal. At several points, Booth has to "sing" at such a high pitch she's almost inaudible. It takes physical effort. She braces herself, so as not to strain her voice beyond the limits. Humans might not hear such pitches, but rats can.

The staging, by The Opera Group (director, John Fulljames), fits the music and the semi-narrative. The Man with no Face operates through music: the London Sinfonietta play on stage, behind a gauze curtain, vaguely visible behind the action, very much part of the concept as the orchestra is so important in this opera. The stage is dominated by a huge circular frame. "I can make rats drop from the rim of the world" says the man with no eyes. "But the world, says the minister, is round". "The world – says the man – is the shape my music makes it."

The floor is scattered with black, soft objects. When I attended the performance at Aldeburgh in June, I was close enough to touch and smell the acrid stench of rubber.  It's a striking extra dimension. By the time the production reached London the smell was almost gone. It was less oppressive, but gone too was the extra element of menace..Like music, smell can't be seen but it operates on the mind.

Into the Little Hill was preceded by Luciano Berio's Recital 1, It's a tour de force, testing a singer's full range. It's a stream of consciousness monologue. Susan Bickley was magnificent., singing for nearly 45 minutes. Snatches of Lieder and Opera rise to the surface, receding as her mind moves on to other things. It's tragic, for the singer is desolate, looking back on a lifetime of loneliness.

Since Berio wrote it for Cathy Berberian long after their marriage ended, it's bitterweet, but also strangely affectionate.The interplay between singer and orchestra reflects the interplay between composer and muse. Many in-jokes, such as when Bickley sings "A composer is socially embarrassing when he tries to speak". But that's the whole point, for Berio speaks through the orchestration, The piece is an elaborate puzzle-game, tightly scored with intricate key changes and modulations.

Berio plays with illusion. At one stage, members of the orchestra emerge to share space with Bickley. They start to play, but the sounds are grotesquely distorted. Then they exchange instruments. What do these musicians normally play? This was the London Sinfonietta, Britain's best contemporary music orchestra, an ensemble of virtuosi. Berio is having a laugh, for the rest of the piece is so sophisticated that bad players would be completely lost.

Bickley leans towards the audience, trying to get them to respond to her directly. I very nearly did. Berio and Berberfian would have been thrilled, for part of the concept behind this piece is the relationship between illusion and reality. "Isn't all life theatre?", declaims Bickley, with a diva-like sweep of her arms.


The full review with pix is in Opera Today

George Benjamin Into the Little Hill Aldeburgh

For my main review of George Benjamin's Into the Little Hill at the Linbury, Royal Opera House, London, please see HERE.

Major composers like George Benjamin, and major developments like Into The Little Hill don't pop up all the time. So it's important that Benjamin and his opera be showcased at Aldeburgh Festival. Hearing it at Aldeburgh is specially resonant for those who genuinely know and love the Festival (as opposed to tossers who mouth off).  Britten's vision was to create a place where creative new music could be heard, Thoroughly English as he was, he had little time for stereotype "Englishness" in music. Aldeburgh is not 3 Choirs On Sea.

Fundamentally, Britten and Aldeburgh have always stood for a much more cosmopolitan, progressive approach. Heinrich Schütz to Shostakovich, all part of a grand vision that crosses boundaries of time and genre. In Billy Budd, Officers Redburn and Flint "don't like them Frenchie ways". Britten doesn't like them, and writes grotesques around their roles. He should rise from his grave and smite the redneck bigotry we have today.

So Benjamin's Into the Little Hill is relevant.  It's loosely based on the fairy tale about a conformist community who rat on the piper who rids them of vermin. So he rats on them and takes their kids. Martin Crimp's text is bleak. The howling mob demand "Kill! Kill! and you have our vote",. When it suits the Minister to defend rats, he does, but when it means being re-elected, he'll sell his principles. But the story isn't nearly as straightforward as that.

A "man with no eyes, no nose, no ears" materializes in the Minister's little daughter's bedroom. He invades the sanctuary through dreams and through music. "With music I can reach right in /march slaves to the factory/ or patiently unravel the clouds"  Sinister as he is, he's morally neutral - "The choice is yours" he says to the Minister.

Into the Little Hill operates like a half-remembered dream, flotsam flowing out of the subconscious, the reverse of rats and children disappearing into the bowels of the earth. Precisely because it's imprecise, it works on many levels. It's unsettling because we're used to order and explicit meaning. Benjamin doesn't create "roles". Mezzo and soprano sing and speak snatches of phrases, part narrating, part expressing different facets of the story. The Minister morphs into his little girl, who morphs into the sinister Man with No Face..In a dream, things fade if you look too closely, so in Into the Little Hill, the secret is to let it act on your unconscious.

The whole opera pivots on ideas of dissimulation, concealment, crawling into dark recesses, nothing is safe from being gnawed away. So the music here is cloaked in disguise. You hear something eerie, or harps or bells. Sure enough, there's a cimbalom right in the heart of the orchestra. You hear something tense, tinny and shrill: it's a banjo, and conventional strings being played like banjos, strings plucked high up the shaft, not bowed. Much emphasis on low-toned instruments like bass flute and bass clarinet, whose sensuous, seductive themes weave through the piece like a narcotic night-blooming flower. At one point it sure feels like there's a sound so high pitched that the human ear can't quite hear it: but rats can hear at higher frequencies than we can.

The staging, by The Opera Group, (director : John Fulljames), fits the music and the semi-narrative. The Man with no Face operates through music : the London Sinfonietta play on stage, behind a gauze curtain, vaguely visible behind the action.  The stage is dominated by a huge circular frame. "I can make rats drop from the rim of the world" says the man with no eyes. "But the world, says the minister, is round". "The world - says the manm- is the shape my music makes it; the choice is yours"

The floor is scattered with black, soft objects. At Aldeburgh, you can get close enough to touch and smell the acrid stench of rubber. The orchestra and singers must be aware of the smell all the time, unpleasant and sinister. It's an amazing extra dimension, completely lost on those in the posh seats. The man with no face has senses like sight and hearing though he doesn't seem to have the means. The audience doesn't twig but the performers have it all round them. Like music, smell can't be seen but it operates on people. That's also why the opera starts with the image of orderliness trying to sweep the debris, trying to impose neatness onto something that defies order. 

Brilliant decision to pair Into the Little Hill with Luciano Berio's Recital 1. This, too, starts with a cleaner, sweeping the same black stuff. At first it seems like it's a mistake, then you're seduced by the actor's elaborate tattoos. How does a woman whose body is a work of art become a cleaner? And that, in a single frame, is what Berio is after, the concept that things aren't necessarily quite what they seem.

Recital 1 is a showcase monologue for mezzo, which Berio wrote for Cathy Berberian, as a tribute to her range, and to her past. Susan Bickley is magnificent, as the diva spouting stream of consciousness, singing half formed snatches of different music, randomly shifting back into declamation. Sometimes she speaks directly to the audience. I had to force myself not to answer her calls, even though that would have extended what was happening ion stage into the audience, which is not a bad idea, given how Berio is playing with different levels of reality. We could have improvised, Susan and me!

Recital 1 is an inventive game of puzzles, so Berio packs as much into it as he can. It tends to make the idea go on a little longer than it needs, but that's OK. They don't write music this intricate too often. It goes with Into The Little Hill extremely well: maybe they'll be the Cav and Pag of the 21st century.  Last year, Birtwistle's At the Greenwood Side was just too oppressive to be heard with anything else. So hearing Into the Little Hill with Berio is an altogether different experience, far more sympathetic.

Superlative performances, especially from Susan Bickley, who carried off the rour de force that is Recital 1 and followed with the demanding, atmospheric main draw. Bickley is wonderful, at her prime. Claire Booth was excellent too. Some women in a delicate way can't cope with the smell of rubber, so all the more to her credit!  To be honest, Bickley and Booth have Benjamin, and indeed most contemporary British music sewn up, if it can be. Oh, for a DVD of Bickley and Booth and the Sinfonietta, of this production!

In Into The Little Hill, the interplay between the two voices is extremely important.  On the recording, Hilary Summers and Anu Komsi are too different, making the piece deceptively straightforward and confusing, Bickley and Booth, on the other hand, have voices that complement each other so closely that it adds an extra, disturbing element to the piece because their balance is so subtle. 

The photo above shows the Martello Tower at the end of the harbour at Aldeburgh. It was built to repel Napoleon and dangerous ideas from the Continent, like democracy and the metric system. As it happened, Napoleon was more interested in Russia. The tower is on a little hill, as solidly built as a hill itself. Lots of interesting ideas might grow from thinking about it, and Benjamin's masterwork together, but that is, as the Man with no eyes might say, "Your choice"

Please see my other posts on Benjamin, Aldeburgh, Britten and The London Sinfonietta.

George Benjamin Into the Little Hill

The big news about the long-awaited London premiere of George Benjamin's Into the Little Hill was that it wasn't. A power cut minutes into the performance and that was it. Read about it on boulezian and intermezzo's blogs (follow link at right). Intermezzo has pix!

Since many people don't live within taxi distance, the "solution"to the power cut was pretty unfair. Lots of people are out of pocket and not just for tickets. Next time let's hope they do the right thing and offer refunds. There must be insurance for these things.

Luckily, I had cancelled my tickets for the first night and caught the whole show on the second night. For a change I hit the jackpot. This was a wonderful performance with Benjamin himself conducting the London Sinfonietta. Claire Booth and Susan Bickley, often raved here on this blog, sang the vocal parts. This is a new production by The Opera Group. Follow the link below to read more about them and the background to the opera. Their site has photos, video and audio clips - recommended!

Into the Little Hill reminds me of many things - the cartoon/novel Maus, even Michael Jackson's truly creepy song "Ben", where the disturbed kid makes friends with a rat. The story is desolate. A man appears in a little girl's bedroom. He has no face...no nose...no eyes. Yet the father does a deal with the sinister stranger and swears on the little girl's life. Seriously sick. The whole opera pivots on ideas of dissimulation, concealment, crawling into dark recesses, nothing is safe from being gnawed away.

This production seems, from pictures, to be more atmospheric than the French one. A circle of black gauze screens orchestra from singers. That's very well thought through, for even the music here is cloaked in disguise. You hear something eerie, or harps or bells. Sure enough, look behind the screens afterwards and there's a cimbalom right in the heart of the orchestra. You hear something tense, tinny and shrill : it's a banjo, and conventional strings being played like banjos, strings plucked high up the shaft, not bowed. Much emphasis is on low toned instruments like bass flute and bass clarinet, whose sensuous, seductive themes weave through the piece like a narcotic night blooming flower. At one point it sure feels like there's a sound so high pitched that the human ear can't quite hear it : but rats can hear at higher frequencies than we can....

Benjamin's writing for voice is a revelation. Unlike Thomas Adès, he doesn't force voices into painful contortion. While the lines are extremely challenging, they flow naturally, almost as speech even when they range up and down octaves. Part of this may be the texts themselves, written thoughtfully, like haiku, allowing the listener's thoughts to form. "The hum of a refrigerator in summer" sings the mezzo, and you know what she means and why it's relevant. Bickley and Booth don't sing "roles" and often their lines are reported speech, echoes perhaps of the ancient tradition of story telling. But there's no mistaking the modernity of this truly disturbing, ambiguous piece. It has a force of its own, which I suspect, even Benjamin and his librettist, Martin Crimp, have channelled as opposed to having consciously written.

What a brilliant idea, too, to pair Into the Little Hill with Harrison Birtwistle's At the Greenwood Side, from 1969. The whole Punch and Judy ethos gives me the creeps, whatever its artistic validity, because it is sick and unhealthy. Perhaps that's the point Birtwistle is making. The mummers and their play are frauds, utterly sordid. You can almost smell their stench in this production. But there's a thin line between ironic comment and the celebration of sickness. At least At the Greenwood Side is concise and gets to the point without too much fuss. And Booth's bag lady murderess is so clearly nuts, she's sad, not vicious, unlike the male characters. Nice touch, too, that the London Sinfonietta are dressed in white tie, which for them is "costume". This distances them from the drunken tramps the actors portray. Pity though that the piece is more speech than music. But then is Birtwistle implying that the barbarians have breached the gate ? This piece feels like graffiti in the meanest sense, smeared on art. Good performance and production though. Perhaps that's why it's so effective (and upsetting).

Here's The Opera Group's link, with photos, video clips and audio samples:

http://www.theoperagroup.co.uk/productions/more/into_the_little_hill_down_by_the_greenwood_side/