Proms Satuday Matinée 1 - BCMG/Ollu - Boulez, Usui, Jolas, and Lee, 25 July 2015

Cadogan Hall

Boulez, arr. Johannes Schöllhorn – Notations II, XI, X (1945, arr. 2011, United Kingdom premiere)

Schöllhorn – La Treizième (2011, United Kingdom premiere)
Shiori Usui – Ophiocordyceps unilateralis s.l. (2015, world premiere)
Betsy Jolas – Wanderlied (2003, United Kingdom premiere)
Joanna Lee – Hammer of Solitude (2015, BBC commission, world premiere)
Boulez – Dérive 2 (1988-2006, rev.2009)

Ulrich Heinen (cello)

Hilary Summers (contralto)
Birmingham Contemporary Music Group
Franck Ollu (conductor)

It might seem churlish to complain about the BBC Proms coverage of Pierre Boulez’s 90^th anniversary. After all, there are a few performances dotted around – although some seem rather oddly programmed, as if embarrassed at the presence of new or newish music. (That could certainly not be claimed in the present case.) Yet I cannot help but wish that someone had shown the imagination and necessary determination to programme Boulez’s electronic masterpiece, Répons: for once, surely a work that might have been revealed to good advantage in the Royal Albert Hall. For that, one alas – as so often – has not only to go elsewhere, but abroad: be it to Paris, Amsterdam, Salzburg… (I have opted for Salzburg next month, and look forward to the Ensemble Intercontemporain under Matthias Pintscher revealing the work in the flesh to me for the first time.)

Anyway, missed opportunities aside – by the way, how about some Stockhausen? I’ve never heard a better-suited ‘RAH work’ than Cosmic Pulses – we heard a well-, often very well-performed Proms Matinée at Cadogan Hall, with no shortage of music that was either new to the country or new to the world. First up were three of Johannes Schöllhorn’s arrangements for ensemble of Notations (the piano originals, not Boulez’s extraordinary orchestral expansions). The Birmingham Contemporary Music Group under Franck Ollu sounded slightly unfocused to start with, but Notation X had a very keen rhythmic sense. La Treizième was a nice surprise: one bar from each of the twelve added together, to form another, intriguingly unified twelve-bar piece. It actually put me a little in mind of the revisiting of earlier waltzes in Ravel’s Valses nobles et sentimentales, though perhaps I am just being a little sentimental there. I liked Schöllhorn’s sous-bois very much when I heard it at the Wigmore Hall last year; we need to hear more of him in this country. A Proms performance of a larger-scale work would be greatly appreciated another season.

Shiori Usui’s Ophiocordyceps unilateralis s.l. will surely face little competition for the foreseeable future in the world of nomenclature. We learned from a brief conversation between the composer and Tom Service that the piece is named after an infectious fungus which works its negative magic upon ants. (Whilst I remember, the printed programmes for the Saturday Matinées are, quite simply, a disgrace: not a single word on either the works or the non-Boulez composers. Can something equivalent to the evening concerts, or at least something better than that not be managed?) In five very short movements – ‘Camponotus leonarci’, ‘Spores’, ‘Pathology’, ‘The Grip’, and ‘Hyphae’ – we heard a considerable array of ensemble colour, very different in each case. There was perhaps a sense of Boulezian éclat, albeit more overtly, or at least conventionally, thematic, and also sometimes more tonal in language. It was elevating to see one newspaper critic rise from his seat and leave after that performance; it will be interesting to see whether his review covers the rest of the concert.

Betsy Jolas is but a year younger than Boulez. We seem to hear her music very little in this country; the United Kingdom premiere of Wanderlied was therefore especially welcome. Wanderlied was inspired by the idea of an old woman (the cello) travelling from town to town as storyteller, the tile borrowed from a 1943 poem by Jolas’s father. Crowds gather around the woman and comment, but two people in the crowd do not like her, yet continue to follow. What emerged was a long-breathed, humorous piece, assure both of craft and emotional expression, timbre not surprisingly an important connecting force between the two, insofar – a big ‘insofar’ – as they may be separated. I thought of it as, in a way, a song without words, or perhaps better a cantata without words. Jolas looked, by the way, almost incredibly sprightly on stage, so we have every reason to hear a good deal more from her, programming permitting.

I wish I could be so enthusiastic, or indeed at all enthusiastic, about Joanna Lee’s Hammer of Solitude. The idea fits, clearly a reference to Le Marteau sans maître – and the participation of Hilary Summers fitted too. Summers proved her usual self, that most individual of voices as communicative with words and notes as one could ask for. Alas, the three movements – ‘The hammer alone in the house’, ‘A presentiment’, and ‘A suicide’ – seem strangely childish, which is not to say childlike, in construction and expression. Word-painting is obsessive, yet basic, almost as if following a guide in a compositional exercise. The (very) sub-Berberian noises at the opening hint at a greater ambition, which yet remains unrealised. The final line: ‘Release complete, relief’. Quite.

 

Finally, Dérive 2. It is the Boulez work I still find the most difficult to come to grips with; I cannot claim to ‘understand’ it and indeed find it almost disconcertingly ‘pleasant’ in its progress. Boulez’s constructivism, albeit a flowing constructivism, came across clearly and, crucially, with structural as well as expressive meaning. The ghost of Messiaen seemed intriguingly to hover, or rather to fly, at times, not least in some of those gloriously splashy piano chords. The ‘lead’ taken by different instruments at different times was, perhaps, more than usually apparent, suggesting almost an updated sinfonia concertante, whereas, for instance, Daniel Barenboim’s performances (see here and here; number three will come in Salzburg next month) have emerged, at least to my ears, as more orchestrally conceived. As is the way with even half-decent performances of such music, I noticed things I had never heard before. Something that especially struck me on this occasion was the timbral similarity – surely testament to Boulez’s work as conductor – to a passage in The Rite of Spring. I shall have to look at the scores to find where and when, or perhaps I shall never re-discover what my ears were telling me on that occasion. Such is a good part of the mystery and the magic of live performance.

Le Vin herbé, Berlin Staatsoper, 22 April 2014

Images:  (c) Hermann und Clärchen Baus

 

Schiller Theater

Soprano 1 – Narine Yeghiyan

Soprano 2/Iseut la blonde – Anna Prohaska

Soprano 3/Branghien – Evelin Novak

Alto 1/Iseut aux blanches mains – Virpi Räisänen

Alto 2/Iseut mère – Katharina Kammerloher

Alto 3 – Stephanie Atanasov

Tenor 1 – Thorbjørn Gulbrandsøy

Tenor 2/Tristan – Matthias Klink

Tenor 3/Kaherdin – Peter Gijsbertsen

Bass 1 – Arttu Kataja

Bass 2/Le Roi Marc – Ludvig Lindström

Bass 3/Le Duc Höel – Jan Martiník

Katie Mitchell (director)

Joseph W Alford (co-director)

Lizzie Clachan (designs)

James Farncombe (lighting)

Katharina Winkler (dramaturgy)

 

Members of the Staatskapelle Berlin

Franck Ollu (conductor)

Premiered in May last year, Katie Mitchell’s production of Frank Martin’s oratorio, Le Vin herbé, is now revived in fine form by the Berlin State Opera. Mitchell’s tendency towards one-size-fits-all suits some works better than others, but is in any case more restrained here. One perhaps also has greater liberty – or at least greater immunity from werktreu charges of desecration – in staging an oratorio anyway. Interestingly, the first staging took place as early as 1948, at the Salzburg Festival under Ferenc Fricsay, no less, only six years after the Zurich Madrigal Choir gave the first performance of the completed version (the first part having been performed by the same choir two years earlier than that). Mitchell’s approach is metatheatrical, as one would expect, but without the paraphernalia of cameras and so forth; rather, we see a dramatisation of, if not the first performance, then a performance recognisably of that time. Rituals create themselves, gain impetus, both from the performers’ behaviour and the props provided: notably a table and a bed. There is more than a scent of Brecht: no bad thing, especially in Berlin. Clearly the performers have been well-choreographed, but they also give the impression of being those performers performing, not just of doing what they have been told. It is a fine production, which other companies and venues would do well to consider taking up. ENO or the Barbican perhaps?

 

 

 

 

At the table - Matthias Kling (TRISTAN), Anna Prohaska (ISEUT LA BLONDE), behind: Thorbjørn Gulbrandsøy, Evelin Novak, Katharina Kammerloher, Stephanie Atanasov, Narine Yeghiyan, Arttu Kataja, Jan Martiník, Ludvig Lindström, Peter Gijsbertsen, Virpi Räisänen

The work itself is alluring, typical of what I know of the composer in its epitomising Webern’s summarising twelve-note composition as involving imbibing of the method and then composing as before. Frankly tonal, and yet so clearly, so rigorously organised, its roots lie as much in, say, Pelléas as Tristan, despite the use on occasion of quotation and the inevitable comparisons any composer, or indeed artist, will now meet when daring to treat with this legend.  Yes, it comes from Joseph Bédier’s novel, Tristan et Iseut, but facts are no refuge from the overpowering Rausch of Tristan; it is to Martin’s great credit that he is not overpowered, far from it, without self-conscious distancing. Much of Tristan is, of course, chamber music, whatever ‘popular opinion’ will tell you; here, the ensemble is of true chamber proportions: twelve voices, two violins, two violas, two cellos, double bass, and piano. Some of that Second Viennese School sound arises – I could not help but think of Schoenberg’s wonderful Weihnachtssmusik – but that more betokens correspondence, if not quite coincidence, than anything stronger. It is a true oratorio, too, with roots in a great tradition but, again, not overwhelmed by it. Narrative works on its own terms, rather than as that of an opera manqué.

 

Anna Prohaska (SOPRAN 2 | ISEUT LA BLONDE)

Franck Ollu conducted the excellent soloists (Wolfram Brandl, Yunna Shevchenko, Boris Bardenhagen, Nikolaus Janhjohr-Popa, Mathias Winkler, Frank-Immo Zichner) from the Staatskapelle Berlin. He seemed to me to do a very good job, sensitive to music, to drama, to the way the two combine and keep their distance (especially in a production such as this). But in a performance such as this, the element of chamber music is at least as important, and here the Berlin orchestra’s long tradition, aided and abetted by Daniel Barenboim, of subdivision into chamber ensembles, truly paid off. The singers impressed too, though perhaps a little more of Martin’s quasi-madrigalian intent might have been communicated at times. The intent was worlds away, of course, from today’s early-music world, but a hint or two of something akin to Nadia Boulanger’s singers – their Monteverdi still rules at least a certain roost – would have bound them together more closely. Anna Prohaska shone as Iseut, her voice revealing considerable deepness as well as purity of tone.  Matthas Klink made for an ardent yet sensitive Tristan. Ludvig Lindström exhibited a degree of malevolence which, in terms of psychological realism, is perhaps more credible, certainly more usual, than that we associate with Wagner’s King Mark. Yet another feather, then, in the Staatsoper’s cap.

 

Currie/Hodges/Summers/Aurora Orchestra/Ollu et al. - Stockhausen and Boulez, 5 October 2013

Queen Elizabeth Hall

Stockhausen – Gesang der Jünglinge

Stockhausen – Kontakte

Boulez – Le Marteau sans maître

Sound Intermedia

Colin Currie (percussion)

Nicholas Hodges (piano)

Hilary Summers (contralto)

Members of the Aurora Orchestra

Franck Ollu (conductor)

 

Not for the first time, a concert of post-war avant-garde music showed what a thirst there is to hear music from this scandalously neglected area of the repertoire performed. The Queen Elizabeth Hall was sold out, a friend of mine having bought just in time one of the last remaining tickets. Whatever the reasons for not performing this music might be, lack of interest and demand is certainly not one. Whilst some of the selections for the Southbank Centre’s Rest is Noise season have to my mind been baffling – take, for instance, the wildly exaggerated importance soon to be ascribed to the tedious outpourings of minimalism, ‘holy’ and otherwise – the only regret here is that we could not hear more from a period whose music remains at least as bracing, as vital, as it did when first written and first performed. Indeed, as some though by no means all orchestras and halls fall back upon crowd-pleasing aural junk food as their token ‘modern music’, it becomes all the more necessary to hear, as it were, the real thing: Neue Musik, be it Stockhausen, Lachenmann, Schoenberg, or Bach.

Stockhausen’s Gesang der Jünglinge proves a quickening experience every time one hears it. We have lost the shock value of a piece of ‘merely’ electronic music; that will probably never return. But we have gained the ability to hear such a piece as a repertoire work, a classic, with both the advantages and dangers that entails. This time around, I was taken anew by the sense, early on though not only early on, of seeming aurally and of course spatially the very company of heaven. Stockhausen’s music might not sound ‘like’, say, the Sanctus from Bach’s B minor Mass, but the effect, the experience might not be entirely different. The flames of the text’s fiery furnace (Daniel 3) flickered as bright as ever, perhaps still more so; I could certainly feel the heat. Later, it was as if we were approaching the sanctuary, or a sanctuary, itself, whatever that might be. Musical? Divine? Were there already premonitions of the cosmogony of Licht? The composer’s heterodox Catholic mysticism seemed almost as strong as that of Messiaen; so, of course, did his technical radicalism.

 

It was salutary to be reminded by Tim Rutherford-Johnson’s informative programme notes that Shostakovich denounced Stockhausen as a representative of ‘decadent capitalist culture’ at the 1958 Brussels World’s Fair. The multifarious disciples of the latter-day St Dmitri would do well to remember that aggressive æsthetic attacks were far from the sole province of the avant-garde. Stockhausen, who began work on Kontakte in the same year as Shostakovich’s attack, was better advised to respond with a work whose compositional riches dwarf anything the Soviet composer could have dreamed of, though a little more than twenty years later, Helmut Lachenmann’s ‘Open Letter to Hans Werner Henze’ would deal with more or less the same issue:

 

Can there be a more presumptuous and, at the same time, ignorant programme than the propagation of a “human art” (in contrast to the up-to-now inhuman ...) and then the claim to be composing ‘finally, again, for the public’? For whom then were Nono’s Il canto sospeso, La terra e la campagna, Stockhausen’s Gruppen and Kontakte, Boulez’s Le Marteau sans maître, Berio’s Epifania and Cage’s Concert for Piano and Orchestra composed? Reproaching a hermetically sealed music for insiders only repeats the favourite excuse of a public which runs for cover when faced with works like those just names. It runs because it is more affected by the emotive power experienced in these works than it is entertained by the emotions of the collected neo-symphonists.

 

At any rate, dspite a barbaric intervention of premature applause – Soviet methods for dealing with such behaviour might usefully be employed here – Nicholas Hodges, Colin Currie, and Sound Intermedia unleashed a dazzling display of virtuosity that was yet entirely at the service of Stockhausen’s endlessly restive imagination. Even a mobile telephone call for once seemed almost to blend with the array of percussive and electronic sonorities. As with any work worth its salt, one experiences different facets and listens in different ways on different occasions. I was struck here by the contest between what one might characterise as dialectical opposing forces: stillness and hyper-activity, peace and violence, attack and aural reconciliation, intimacy (think for instance, of the almost vocal duet between piano and xylophone) and swarming, swirling, all-enveloping extroversion as electronics and ‘conventional’ instruments enhance the capabilities of each other and indeed of the audience itself. Above all, there was a true sense of the opening up of possibilities, the greatest legacy of a ‘Darmstadt’ that could not have been further removed from that of doctrinaire caricature. (It was almost quaintly ‘retro’ to see a couple of people walk out.) Above all, we were reacquainted with a composer whose sheer inventiveness places him with Haydn.

 

For the second half, Hilary Summers joined players of the Aurora Orchestra under Frank Ollu for what perhaps continues to be the emblematic musical work of the 1950s, Boulez’s Le Marteau sans Maître. For Boulez, the high watermark of total serialism has already passed; as our distance from its origins increases from its origins, we increasingly seem to perform and to hear the work as much as a labyrinthine extension of Schoenberg and Berg, towards whose nostalgia the young(ish) Boulez felt more than a little suspicion, as to Webern’s crystalline purity. The difference of the sound world from anything we had heard from Stockhausen was immediately apparent. So indeed was every aspect of the compositional ‘voice’: again, an indication that there could have been nothing doctrinaire about the composers’ explorations. Exactitude and ‘expression’ were revealed as sides of the same coin, that old Schoenbergian – or indeed Bachian – coin of freedom and determinism. The players, amongst whom we should count the unmistakeable contralto of Summers, revelled in a seemingly limitless array of instrumental combinations. Though there were occasional, quite understandable, instances of hesitancy, for instance in ‘Commentaire II de “Bourreaux de solitude”,’ this was in most respects a commanding performance, those hangmen of solitude uncovering memories, fleeting, perhaps even imaginary, of Ravel’s ‘Le Gibet’ from Gaspard de la nuit, the second ‘commentary’ perhaps the most mesmerising of all. In keeping with the general theme of exploration, new worlds seemed to open up in the double of ‘Bel difice et les pressentiments’. Strands may have been brought together, but immediately they suggested, in true serialist fashion, new avenues to follow. As we know, this work was in many ways just the beginning – both for Boulez and his confrères.

 

Recital I/Into the Little Hill, The Opera Group, 24 July 2010

Linbury Studio Theatre, Royal Opera House, Covent Garden

Berio - Recital I

The Singer – Susan Bickley
The Accompanist – John Constable
The Dresser – Nina Kate

Benjamin - Into the Little Hill

Claire Booth (soprano)
Susan Bickley (mezzo-soprano)


John Fulljames (director)
Soutra Gilmour (designs)
Jon Clark (lighting)

London Sinfonietta
Franck Ollu (conductor)


If only all the offerings on the Royal Opera House’s main stage were of the quality of this fine double bill at the Linbury Studio Theatre. Some are first-class, of course, yet some could learn a great deal from performance, direction, and choice of repertoire here. I attended the first Covent Garden performance of George Benjamin’s Into the Little Hill, last February. There it was programmed, in this same production, with Birtwistle’s music-theatre piece Down by the Greenwood Side. That received a fine performance; unfortunately, a power failure put paid to the Benjamin (ironically, given the threat rats pose to electricity supplies in the work itself), so that I only heard a few minutes of it. Some time after I had left, Into the Little Hill was eventually performed in the Linbury Bar. I wish I had experienced that, but alas it was not to be, so this was essentially my first hearing, albeit with a taster of what was to come.

On the present occasion, an equally apt coupling, albeit entirely different in nature, was Berio’s Recital I, written for Cathy Berberian, but now performed by Susan Bickley. Berio presents a singer who, having arrived on stage to give a recital, realising after she has begun to sing that her pianist is not there. The ‘accompaniment’ to her opening Monteverdi piece – an appropriate nod to the arie antiche tradition, and also a signal of Berio’s love for the composer and Berberian’s expertise in his music – therefore requires an orchestra she conjures up in her mind. We have all done it, though perhaps not in such extreme circumstances – assuming this to be ‘real’: is it, and what does that even mean? Her ‘accompanist’, the ever-dependable – except in terms of the drama – John Constable, comes and goes, but the orchestra is always there, like her neuroses, her failed loves, her attempts to construct some sense from her experience. Through the myriad of musical fragments she presents, we learn something of a relationship that has disintegrated. From folk song to Brünnhilde's Immolation Scene, from ‘Dido’s Lament’ to Pierrot Lunaire, from Meyerbeer to Benjamin, performer, director, and audience must perform complementary but doubtless divergent acts of construction. For instance, hat I had heard Dame Felicity Lott give Poulenc’s Hôtel as a recent encore would perforce make me listen differently from someone not present at that Wigmore Hall recital.

Bickley has always been a versatile artist, just as Berberian was, but this was a challenge indeed, which she surmounted with great aplomb. One could believe in her as a character, as The Singer, too, likewise in Nina Kate’s splendidly observed, wryly ‘alternative’ Dresser. Soutra Gilmour’s costumes and John Fulljames’s direction were all very much of a piece, and the London Sinfonietta’s contribution under Franck Ollu (whom I had previously heard conduct Pascal Dusapin’s Passion in Aix) was typically excellent. At various points, members of the Sinfonietta were called to come on stage, to act, even to exchange instruments. Needless to say, they remained unfazed by such a challenge. Not for nothing are they considered second to none as a new-music ensemble. The final Lied, Berio’s own, was deeply – and yet lightly – moving, just as it should be for the avant-gardist with a sense of humour.

The Sinfonietta’s sterling work, and Ollu’s, continued in Into the Little Hill. If it had taken more than a year before I was able to hear the entire work, my expectations were matched by my experience. The work Benjamin and his librettist, Martin Crimp, present is a modern, equally chilling version of the Pied-Piper of Hamelin story. Here, the Minister, threatened by the populace, gives into its demands that the rats, who, he personally believes, have a place in society, be exterminated. He gains re-election, to the ‘grateful shriek’ of the crowd, by promising the blank-faced Stranger, whom he discovers in his daughter’s bedroom ‘stooped over his sleeping child’, a large sum of money in return for ridding society of the rodent menace. When payment time comes, the Minister welches on his debt, the Stranger takes the city’s children away, the Minister’s daughter included; the Minister’s Wife hears the children sing that they are now ‘inside the Little Hill,’ which is now their new home. New Labour all over, really; if only that nightmare had been so eloquently expressed, and had been over with in just under three-quarters of an hour...

Benjamin’s sinuous score is concise yet generous, sharp-edged yet beautiful. The pain of the Stranger’s flute has a multiplicity of meanings for us, amongst which one should doubtless account contemporary obsession with ‘the paedophile’. As a parable of the disgusting corruption of modern political life, this short opera seems to me well-nigh perfectly judged. Bickley was now joined by Claire Booth. Between them, two female voices must narrate, take the part of various characters, and act as the crowd. One would have thought this the easiest thing in the world, such was the success with which they accomplished it. The abstraction of the set permitted us to concentrate upon the unfolding drama, but was much more than a blank stage; it shaped, enclosed, enabled. Booth’s Child will linger uncomfortably long in the mind, as will the final cries: ‘And the deeper we burrow the brighter his [the Stranger’s] music burns. Can’t you see? Can’t you see? Can’t you see?’ I was taken with Crimp’s description of the librettist as former of magnesium ribbon, whilst the composer must light it with pure oxygen, that it might burn with intense white light. This role, it seemed to me, he fulfilled admirably, save for a misjudged, jarring ‘by who [sic]’, in order to rhyme with ‘you’. If that, however, is the only fault I can find with the evening, and I think it is, then The Opera Group, ROH2, and all those involved in these performances are justly entitled to their laurels.

Good news: Crimp and Benjamin are writing a new opera, to receive its first performance at the 2012 Aix-en-Provence Festival.

Festival d'Aix en Provence: Pascal Dusapin - Passion, 4 July 2008

(Images - copyright: Elisabeth Carecchio)

Théâtre du Jeu de paume

Lei (Her) – Barbara Hannigan
Lui (Him) – Georg Nigl
Gli Altri (The Others) – Ensemble Musicatreize (direction: Roland Hayrabedian)

Giuseppe Frigeni (director, designs)
Amélie Haas (costumes)
Dominique Bruguière (lighting)

Thierry Coduys (electronics)
Ensemble Modern Frankfurt
Franck Ollu (conductor)

Passion is Pascal Dusapin’s sixth opera. Having received its premiere on 29 June, this was its fourth performance. Interviewed in Le Figaro, Dusapin speaks of the inspiration he has derived from Monteverdi and his age: ‘‘I have a very profound relationship with this period in musical history, which greatly resembles our own in its taste and its experimental research.’ The idea of music as research has a clear kinship with IRCAM and, before that, Darmstadt. Dusapin, following a brief spell of study with Messiaen, became Iannis Xenakis’s sole acknowledged pupil in composition. Yet Dusapin’s comparison, rooted as it may be in his own experience, is not without historical merit. The Florentine Camerata was a group of intellectuals whose theoretical discussions and experiments, attempting to restore a posited unity in Attic drama of speech and song, fully bore fruit in the operas and indeed many of the madrigals of Monteverdi. Use of Italian, in a libretto put together by Dusapin himself and Rita di Letteriis, inevitably brought one a little closer, as did the subject matter: another revisiting of the Orpheus myth, although here the ‘characters’ are not even named. An especially noteworthy aspect of Dusapin’s work is the greater interest shown in Eurydice.

That said, ‘influence’ upon Dusapin would seem, to be more a matter of working in a similar spirit – as the Camerata had renewed the spirit of Greece – than of any real stylistic revival, although there were a few instances if not of quotation than of affinity. An exception might appear to be the use of the harpsichord (Ueli Wiget), synthesiser (Hermann Kretzschmar), and harp (Saara Linnea Rautio), but their – extremely effective – employment was not really of a continuo variety; instead, the instruments were used both in solo and chamber contexts. It seemed to me that the instruments tended to be used separately from one another earlier on, with some sort of fulfilment or at least climax being denoted by their subsequent combination, a practice putting me in mind of – this may denote nothing other than coincidence – Stravinsky’s Symphony in Three Movements. A memorable instance of solo employment is in the lengthy harpsichord music – sometimes punctuated by other instruments, but essentially a solo – that accompanies Orpheus’s mime as he dons the unicorn’s head. This seemed to me to hark back less to the Italian than to the French Baroque and there was indeed some music that approached the frankly tonal. The contributions from all members of the Ensemble Modern were excellent, with Franck Ollu keeping a tight but expressive grip upon proceedings. Extended instrumental techniques were sometimes used, though nowhere near so often as one might expect in, say, the work of Helmut Lachenmann, and there was no amplification. Insofar as I could tell from a first hearing, the role of Thierry Coduys in terms of electronic spatial direction appeared beyond reproach. In all of these respects, I cannot imagine that the score could readily have been served better.

Barbara Hanningan, whom I have recently heard give outstanding performances of music by Nono, Berg, and Webern, shone once again here. Occasionally I felt that she lacked the warmth of tone I had heard her project on previous occasions, but in a new work it is often difficult to know how much this might have been attributable to the demands of the music and interpretation. Certainly her range and precision were as impressive as ever, as was her acting. Georg Nigl was subjected to equally great demands in his part. He appeared to grow into the part, his tone sounding a little pinched earlier on but extraordinarily impressive subsequently in terms of ranging from the baritonal to the haut-contre. Once again, his acting skills were noteworthy. The varied contributions of the Marseilles-based Ensemble Musikatreize were throughout of the very highest order. Its members’ musical and dramatic versatility, both individually and corporately, would have been apparent to all. Their interventions on stage and throughout the theatre always looked and sounded well-judged.

The production also seemed to me a triumph. Giuseppe Frigeni eschewed an overly naturalistic presentation, in terms of a stylisation that worked. Every movement – unlike so many current productions one could name – appeared to have a justification, and therefore told most effectively. The production drew inspiration from, rather than pointlessly railing against, the text and music, although this should in no sense be taken to betoken an unimaginative literalism. Symbolism rather was the order of the day. Lighting and costumes contributed to an impeccable team effort. In the programme, Frigeni also drew our attention – although he hardly needed to – to the centrality of the sun, or ‘le sol(o)eil’, as he put it, punning on the French words for sun and eye. The senses of watching, of being watched, and also, crucially, of transformation of time, were simply but powerfully portrayed by the figure of the sun on stage and its movements. This helped deliver us to our destination, the unsettling conclusion, in which score, performance, and production worked so closely together, to ask us whether Orpheus and Eurydice had ever really been listening to each other – or, indeed, whether they had truly been looking at each other. Passion left us asking more questions than had been answered: not a bad sign at all.