Written on Skin, Deutsche Oper, 1 February 2024

Images: WRITTEN ON SKIN, Regie: Katie Mitchell,
Deutsche Oper Berlin, Premiere: 27. Januar 2024, copyright: Bernd Uhlig

Protector – Mark Stone
Agnès – Georgia Jarman
First Angel, The Boy – Aryeh Nussbaum Cohen
Second Angel, Marie – Anna Werle
Third Angel, John – Chance Jonas-O’Toole
Angel archivists – Leander Gaul, Yasmina Giebeler, Milli Keil, Maximilian Reisinger

Director – Katie Mitchell
Revival director – Dan Ayling
Designs – Vicki Mortimer
Lighting – Jon Clark

Dramaturgy – Sebastian Hanusa  

Orchestra of the Deutsche Oper
Marc Albrecht (conductor)

   

More than a decade has passed since I first saw George Benjamin’s second opera, Written on Skin, at Covent Garden. The premiere, both of the work and Katie Mitchell’s well-travelled production, took place at Aix in 2012. Now it reaches, for the first time, Berlin in a further revival of Mitchell’s staging for the Deutsche Oper. It is my fourth hearing, since I attended both the Royal Opera’s 2017 revival and, the year before, a concertperformance at the Barbican with Aix’s original Mahler Chamber Orchestra. Greater acquaintance leaves my admiration undimmed; if anything, it glows all the brighter. For whilst the casts of my previous encounters had much, though not everything, in common, and Benjamin conducted them all, here we have something new in all but the staging, ably revived by Dan Ayling. 

I shall not attempt a broad overview, whether musical or dramatic, of the work, as I did in 2013. (My review can be read here, for those interested.) Rather, I shall point to some aspects of work, production, and performance that struck me on this occasion. First, I cannot now understand my lukewarmness concerning Mitchell’s staging. Maybe I have grown more accustomed not only to her work but to contemporary theatre more generally. If anything, the danger for me is perhaps the opposite, that I now associate the work with this particular production. There have, astonishingly for a new work, especially a new work that is not, shall we say, of the US ‘easy listening variety’, been numerous productions already; for now, though, this is the only one I have seen. Vicki Mortimer’s split-level set enables us to see the world of angels and that of men (specifically, the Protector, Agnès, her sister and brother-in-law, and The Boy) and, crucially, their transformative interaction, as, for, instance one of the angels is apprised of the situation – narratives already building upon one another – and assumes, as it were, the role of the Boy who will chronicle his patron’s life in words and images. That includes the liberating sexual relationship that arises between him and the brutalised Agnès, the Protector’s ‘property’, truly coming to life in an authentically musicodramatic marriage of words, music, and staging. Indeed, the eroticism here of Benjamin’s score struck me more strongly than ever before, perhaps a hallmark of conductor Marc Albrecht’s approach to the work.

 

So does what might seem a commonplace of drama, yet here seems particular, unique, partly because one is led to feel, not only observe, it in its very particular character: inexorability of fate. As tightly organised a score as The Turn of the Screw, yet less obviously so, holds us captive, almost like Agnès herself. It beguiles, perhaps even breaths a little of the Occitan air, mediæval and now, but never via an attempt to reproduce or even to represent. Illumination, in whatever sense we care, is both more complex and more immediate than that.  There is certainly commentary; it is inscribed, as it were, upon the very skin of the work. Yet however much the angels might classify, file away, their real work is in transformation: of persons and perhaps ultimately of souls.

Senses of time passing, of claustrophobia, of fate closing in – though never merely mirroring – the work – and indeed of an uncontrollable, dangerous joy that must be controlled, yet in that act of controlling requires new life are conveyed scenically in new layers of an activity that conspires both to be particular and quotidian. It is almost a religious ritual, bringing further to life a quasi-Passion of passion to join works such as Così fan tutte and Tristan und Isolde, as well as the more obviously (and musically) related Pelléas et Mélisande. In work and performance, this intriguing, almost mythical combination of straightforward action and elusive allusion that may or may not be symbolism suggests a temporal palimpsest. (Not for nothing, perhaps, is one of Benjamin’s major orchestral works an exploration of that idea.)

By the same token, though, there is no doubting the rawness and immediacy of acts, of things also being very much what they seem. In Agnès’s words not only of liberation, but also of the Boy’s instruction: ‘Love’s not a picture; love is an act.’ This and so many other moments confirmed and furthered my admiration for Martin Crimp’s libretto. Unlike so many attempts at writing for opera, Crimp’s work for Benjamin here and elsewhere permits plenty of space for music. Indeed, if one did not know, one might struggle to guess which came first; it would be fascinating to read any correspondence they may have had about this.

 

Performance is itself a necessary act. We are not here speaking merely of something written or drawn on the page. Albrecht and the Orchestra of the Deutsche Oper gave a commanding performance, with all the freshness of discovery yet also an understanding and conviction that might have been born of repertoire status. (It is, arguably, a repertoire opera now, yet not yet in this house, for this was only its second performance.) Georgia Jarman made the role of Agnès very much her own, fully inhabiting a character come to life through the alchemy of music as well as words and staging. One felt her predicament strongly, shared her struggle and ultimate revenge, without the drama being reduced merely to them. Mark Stone’s Protector was cruel and, in his own way, righteous, torn himself between two loves, the question of his feelings for The Boy opened up rather than ‘dealt with’. Pride and vulnerability were both present. Aryeh Nussbaum Cohen’s performance as The Boy might almost have stolen the show in its uncannily angelic combination of the worldly and otherworldly; that is, it might have done, had the cast not worked so closely together. Anna Werle and Chance Jonas-O’Toole, doubling as Angels and, respectively, Marie and John offered equally fine performances in smaller roles. For in richness of layering and sureness of fatal direction, this was a performance as well as a work created and recreated through its writing on skin.

Musikfest Berlin (3) - Prohaska/Ensemble Modern/Benjamin - Chin, Ogonek, Filidei, Benjamin, and Ammann, 3 September 2023

Philharmonie

Unsuk Chin: SPIRA
Elizabeth Ogonek: Cloudline
Francesco Filidei: Cantico delle Creature (world premiere)

Benjamin: A Mind of Winter
Dieter Ammann: glut

Anna Prohaska (soprano)

Ensemble Modern

George Benjamin (conductor)

© Fabian Schellhorn / Berliner Festspiele

The second of George Benjamin’s Ensemble Modern concerts, again with Anna Prohaska, offered four pieces from the last decade, one a world premiere, together with an early work of Benjamin’s own. Unsuk Chin’s SPIRA (2019) was the first of three works from composers born within a couple of years of each other, the other two being Dieter Ammann and Benjamin himself. Having just noticed SPIRA is officially described as a concerto for orchestra, I am patting myself on the back just a little, though it should probably be the composer (and performers) I am acknowledging, for it came across in that vein, albeit, as one might expect, reinvented, different instruments seemingly presenting their own standpoint on the orchestra. Indeed, the idea of a standpoint or perspective seemed to me key both to work and performance. Whether the opening were a matter of the rest of the orchestra responding, via a series of shocks, to gradual opening out from tuned (bowed) percussion, or the two vibraphones, xylophone, and others responding to those shocks is perhaps in itself a matter of perspective—or a pointless question: ‘why either-or?’ Massed violin swarming perhaps inevitably brought Chin’s teacher Ligeti to mind, but there was no question that here were her own voice and her own world. Indeed, the piece seemed to convey an interest, doubtless born of Jakob Bernouill’s logarithmic spiral (whence the title), in defining limits and direction of that world. What were its edges, and where was it heading? A mystery remained at its heart, at least for this listener, and that was all to the good. 

Elizabeth Ogonek’s Cloudline was premiered at the 2021 Proms, but this was the first time I had heard it. (I think the same is true of all five works, Benjamin’s included.) It certainly shared a keen sense of fantasy and indeed virtuosity with Chin’s work, and opening slithering of pitch (quartertones, I think) offered another variety of swarming, not only from strings; otherwise, though, the work offered more contrast than complement. There was here something close to representation, at least at one level. ‘Liminal’ is a word I probably overuse at the moment, but it is difficult to avoid here, given the piece’s fascinating preoccupation with clouds, their edges (again) and the lack of definition to those edges. A contrast between definition and vagueness, or at least something more frayed, sounds Debussyan, but I never experienced this as anything other than itself, not least in a feeling of outright joy that is perhaps rarer in contemporary orchestral music (or our responses) than it might be. 

I felt less sure about Francesco Filidei’s Cantico delle Creature, or perhaps it is fairer to say it did not necessarily adhere to my expectations (and why should it?) There was no questioning, here or elsewhere, the excellence of the performances, to which now must be added Anna Prohaska’s committed advocacy. A setting of St Francis’s celebrated canticle joins illustrious company, not least that of Liszt, but Filidei certainly made his own way, responding, it seemed to me, to St Francis’s Umbrian dialect in a way so as to harness something old as well as something new, as revealed in Prohaska’s sometimes almost folklike delivery. Clear, bell-like, it was not trying to be anything it was not, far from it, but rather its terms of reference, moving from a wide-eyed naïveté to something more demonstrative, resonated both with words and orchestra. For this was another highly ‘atmospheric’ piece, a lengthy orchestral opening offering scene-setting pictorial and dramatic. When a vibrato-less cello (later in the piece, a viola too) entered, it suggested mediaeval intervention, a voice from a past not merely imagined. Sudden changes of metre and delivery, birdcall whistles, and more provided colour as well as formal staging posts. This was not necessarily a subtle work, but instead often highly gestural; in any case, subtlety was hardly called for. 

Benjamin’s The Snow Man, from 1981, after Wallace Stevens, proved an astonishingly accomplished piece from the word go, its orchestral sound world, icy yet full of life, immediately, as it were, ‘created’ and immanent. The composer’s use of the voice, and his soloist’s use of hers, were both unquestionably vocal and daringly instrumental: two sides, we realised, of the same coin. Wind echoes made that point still clearer. Somewhere between a scena and a tone poem, it was in reality only ever ‘itself’, over too soon, which is always a good sign. Word-setting always told, always added something; this was never merely ‘setting’ the text. It was always, moreover, a response to English words, in an emphatic sense. Prohaska’s animated, even possessed performance gave a sense that this too might have been written for. It was not, of course, but what greater compliment can be offered—in either direction? ‘For the listener, who listens in the snow, and, nothing himself, beholds nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.’ 

Ammann’s glut (2014-16) opened in immediate, indeed urgent fashion. Uniquely, among the pieces heard here, it employed full orchestra at the start, thus setting up very expectations and contrasts. Indeed, it proved remarkably relentless – not in a bad way –something of a riot, with swagger to match. Ammann seemed readier to include tonal voices, or more interested in doing so, though probably more from a spectralist standpoint than anything neoromantic (which was not suggested). Diversity of material and (again) standpoints, of texture and direction, contributed to a sense of a huge mass, not only of sound but of musicians, moving forward, slowly but surely, though one could perhaps perceive that only after the event. At the time, one enjoyed the ride, without necessary thought, less alone knowledge, as to where it might take one.

Musikfest Berlin (2) - Varèse, Haddad, Ravel, Bach-Benjamin, and Schoenberg, 2 September 2023

Kammermusiksaal, Philharmonie

Varèse: Octandre
Saed Haddad: Mirage, Mémoire, Mystère, for string quartet
Ravel: Trois Poèmes de Stéphane Mallarmé
Bach, arr. Benjamin: Canon & Fugue
Schoenberg: Chamber Symphony no.1, op.9

Anna Prohaska (soprano)
Ensemble Modern
George Benjamin (conductor)

Image: © Fabian Schellhorn / Berliner Festspiele

The first of two Musikfest Berlin Proms from Anna Prohaska, Ensemble Modern, and George Benjamin offered music on a small ensemble scale that proved anything but ‘small’ in terms of ambition and intensity, nor of course achievement. A hallmark of all we heard was concentration, for this was highly concentrated, often richly textured music, which also called for – and seemed to receive – a high level of concentration from the audience in Berlin’s Kammermusiksaal, the smaller of the two halls in its Philharmonie.

 

In Varèse’s Octandre, Christian Hommel’s oboe initially appeared to be searching—but searching for what? Ultimately for something piercing, impervious, something that gave the impression of always having been there, however recently discovered. Stravinskian echoes, above all of the Rite, yet also of Symphonies of Wind Instruments, did battle, though they were so familiar, so integrated, they were barely ghosts, more guests. Delphine Roche’s piccolo solo, when it came, suggested something more playful, yet ensemble response was implacable as ever, akin to seeing or rather hearing the same object from another standpoint, both of angle and distance. Yet there was difference in what we heard, for instance the duet between double bass and bassoon, spreading to the ensemble as a whole. Brass rightly took no prisoners. Varèse, not unlike Stravinsky himself, remained. 

Saed Haddad, a Benjamin pupil, was represented by his Mirage, Mémoire, Mystère (2011-12), for string quartet, described as being for violin and string trio. That interests me, since I did not really make that distinction when listening. Perhaps I will next time, for I hope there will be a next time. A richly turbulent opening put me in mind right away of Schoenberg’s developing variation. Indeed, there were a few striking coincidences of pitch and harmony, though I suspect that is more that I was listening with Schoenberg in mind than intent or reference. Certainly, there was an emotional intensity to this single-movement work I can imagine that composer admiring. Its development, or transformation, was rhythmic too, through a kaleidoscope of related moods that, in retrospect, seemed to convey the broad overall progression of the title.

Prohaska joined the Ensemble, and Benjamin returned, for Ravel’s Trois poèmes de Stéphane Mallarmé, the work in which he most clearly approaches Schoenberg (Pierrot, though not only Pierrot), without ever sounding, nor indeed writing, ‘like’ him: not even in the extraordinary opening string harmonics of ‘Soupir’, here perfectly realised in performance. Ravel, at its most characteristic, seems perhaps more the destination than the starting-point, both instrumentally and vocally, yet a floated languor heard and felt, too precise for Debussy, and indeed quite unlike him in other ways too, could only ever have been Ravel’s. It was as if a Japanese engraving, with apologies for the orientalism, had come to life. ‘Placet futile’ proved, doubtless with similar danger on my part, a garden of delights, at times more animated, more heated even, though cooling beautifully too. Prohaska proved a vividly communicative soloists, really using the French words to shape and colour her line. ‘Surgi de la coupe et du bond’ presented flight and descent, movement and stasis, all art of a journey that chilled in timbre and harmony, yet also invited, whilst holding us at an almost sacral distance. ‘A rien expirer annonçant/Une rose dans les ténèbres.’ Some mysteries are both for us and not.

Benjamin’s 2007 Canon & Fugue arranges the ‘Canon alla Ottava’ and ‘Contrapunctus VII’ from Bach’s Art of Fugue for an unusual ensemble: flute (silent in the first movement), two horns, and string quartet (which can be expanded to smallish string orchestra). This is unquestionably modernist Bach, not necessarily in the line of, though surely with kinship to that of Schoenberg, Webern, Berio, and others. That sense of concentration was again apparent, indeed alive, in both movements, the sustaining power of horns (and other particular qualities) employed to excellent effect in the former. The Fugue was less frenetic and furious, though no less concentrated, early use of stopped horns and string pizzicato not only arresting but also seemingly aiding that transformation of tempo. There were many timbral delights and surprises, not least the way a combination of horn, violin, and viola sounded uncannily like an organ, yet this was always a way of hearing Bach.

So too, albeit at a greater distance, is much of Schoenberg. It was fitting, then, to end with his First Chamber Symphony, although this was the performance about which I had a few doubts. A little more than fifteen years ago, I heard Pierre Boulez conduct this same work in the same hall, with the Scharoun Ensemble of players drawn from the Berlin Philharmonic. That struck me as an ideal performance, but perhaps I was simply more used to the underlying assumptions and aesthetic. Benjamin, I think, took the opening, once past the short introduction, not only faster but at a speed at least to rival the earlier Boulez, of Domaine musical vintage. One expects a bias towards wind in this version (as opposed to Schoenberg’s two arrangements for full orchestra, where strings will tend to dominate) yet, to begin with, that balance seemed somewhat exaggerated, even harsh. The performance settled, yet Benjamin’s approach had the merit of reminding us just what difficult music this can, and arguably should, be. Perhaps we have allowed Schoenberg to mellow a little too much, in post-Siegfried-Idyll-manner. When the music slowed, moreover, it really slowed. The scherzo section was urgent, yet in character, that is not merely fast; character seemed to grow out of Schoenberg’s instrumentation and use of those instruments, almost as much as his harmony. This was Schoenberg on a coiled spring, which could nonetheless relax in the ‘slow movement’. Moreover, the internal and external role played by fourths was certainly to be heard, as if this were a matter of casing and inner mechanism. It was another performance of concentrated riches, then, even if not always the riches I had expected.

Tiberghien - Sweelinck, Bach, Benjamin, Beethoven, and Mozart, 1 June 2023

Wigmore Hall

Sweelinck: Six Variations on ‘Mein junges Leben hat ein End’
Bach-Brahms: Partita no.2 in D minor for solo violin, BWV 1004: Chaconne
Benjamin: Shadowlines: Six Canonic Preludes for Piano
Beethoven: Thirty-two Variations on an Original Theme in C minor, WoO 80
Beethoven: Twenty-four Variations on Righini’s arietta, ‘Venni amore’, in D major, WoO 65
Mozart: Piano Sonata in A major, KV 331/300i
Beethoven: Six Variations on an Original Theme in D major, op.76

Cédric Tiberghien (piano)

What variation there can be in variation, especially in the hands of do discerning a pianist and musician as Cédric Tiberghien. From Sweelinck to Benjamin, every performance a jewel, this was a recital as enjoyable as it was ingenious and instructive. 

Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck’s Variations on ‘Mein junges Leben hat ein End’ were imbued with an air of melancholy such as is perhaps more likely on the piano than the harpsichord, the gap between our age and Sweelinck’s paradoxically both more and less pronounced. More important, though, were clarity of line and beauty of touch. Ornamentation told, without distracting. The art of variation had been properly announced, Tiberghien’s second variation boasting pinpoint accuracy and rhetorical flair, his third marrying surface nonchalance with deep harmonic understanding. The fifth emerged as if carved from Carrara marble. All the while, harmony and counterpoint wove their magic. 

Little less than a month earlier, I had heard Benjamin Grosvenor in this same hall play Busoni’s transcription of the Bach Chaconne. Now it was Brahms’s turn; and, Busoni devotee though I may be, I must acknowledge Brahms’s as the finer work. I knew, but even had I not, I am sure I would have heard before seeing that this was left-hand only. Brahms’s stroke of genius in confining his transcription to the piano’s left hand liberates the pianist both to sound more like the violin and, in another paradox, also more like itself; or so it sounded here. Tiberghien’s phrasing and touch were both entirely pianistic – what an array of colours! – and yet entirely communicative of Bach’s own conception. The performance could melt in well-nigh Schumannesque fashion too, again without ever veering away from Bach. The advent of D major proved deeply moving, even stirring, which may or may not be quite the same thing; it built wondrously thereafter too. Ultimately, again, harmony ruled. And the return to the minor offered a tragic acceptance that was equally Bach’s and Brahms’s, the final statement of the theme possessed of a nobility that brooked no response. 

George Benjamin’s Shadowlines, written in 2001, is as its subtitle states, a set of six canonic piano preludes. Tiberghien offered finely etched performances, as if presenting a series of musical paintings coming vividly to life before our ears. (‘As if’ may be superfluous.) Process as well as rhetoric, counterpoint as well as harmony, and so much more helped reveal a deeply Romantic imagination at work. Ghosts from the past – Debussy, Messiaen, Boulez, Webern, Stravinsky – could be heard, yet there was never any doubting the individuality of the principal voice. 

Beethoven’s C minor Variations, WoO 80, rounded off the first half. This may or may not be ‘minor’ Beethoven, but who cares? In a performance that took in a host of experience from the balletic to the visionary, revealing at time surprising affinities with Bach’s Chaconne, a new, little suspected world from this pianist-composer opened up before us. Beethoven sang, scowled, and above all developed in variation. As earlier, Tiberghien’s virtuosity was worn lightly and above all musically, just as in the very little-heard early Righini Variations, WoO 65, probably from 1790, published the following year. Here Tiberghien was at his most charming. He drew attention to individual characteristics and possibilities of different variations – leaning into phrases beautifully in the first, the second proving splendidly eccentric – without trying to make them into something they could not be. Many of the anticipated devices of Classical variation technique were there; they never seemed, though, to be mere devices, and even on occasion offered striking anticipations of the future. Syncopations, particular spacing of chords, the structural importance (and orchestral resonances) of certain intervals, and delicious moments of whimsy: all these and more one could enjoy, just so long as one listened. So too were surprises it was difficult not to think of as Beethovenian. 

Mozart’s A major Sonata, KV 331/300i, opens with a celebrated theme and variations, here given with winning flow and lilt, and for the most part a fine cantabile, save when lyricism gave way to something more percussive. The journey as a whole ‘flowed like oil’, to borrow from Mozart’s own recommendation for musical performance, whilst retaining capacity for incident. The turn to the minor offered pathos without exaggeration, duly dignified, whilst the Adagio sounded intriguingly modernistic in its proliferation: Mozart via Boulez, it seemed. A graceful minuet proved similarly full of character and incident, as did its trio: related, yet quite different, almost a variation in itself. One might say much the same of the Rondo alla Turca, here given with deadpan humour and equally well-timed command of agogic accents. Cannily following with Beethoven’s op.76 Variations, whose theme would later be used for the ‘Turkish March’ for the Ruins of Athens incidental music, Tiberghien gave the work as if it were a programmed encore. Its striking concision, redolent of the Bagatelles and some of the sonatas, revealed similarly good humour. 

For an actual encore, we were treated to a transcription – Egon Petri’s, I think – of Bach’s ‘Sheep May Safely Graze’ (for which, exceptionally, we surely all use the English form). As Tiberghien remarked in his introduction, transcription is another form of variation. What we heard was as delectable, as poised, and as exquisitely voiced as anything in a programme replete with such delights.

Musikfest Berlin (2): Stefanovich/MCO/Benjamin - Knussen, Purcell, Stravinsky, and Benjamin, 2 September 2021

Philharmonie

Knussen: The Way to Castle Yonder, op.21a
Purcell, arr. Benjamin: Three Consorts (German premiere)
Stravinsky: Movements
Benjamin: Concerto for Orchestra (German premiere)
Stravinsky: Pulcinella Suite

Tamara Stefanovich (piano)

Mahler Chamber Orchestra

George Benjamin (conductor)

Images: Astrid Ackermann

In this concert George Benjamin, the Mahler Chamber Orchestra, and Tamara Stefanovich paid tribute to a number of influences on and/or connections with Benjamin’s music, as well as presenting two new works, which had had their first performances a few days earlier at the Proms. Oliver Knussen, featured both as himself, in The Way to Castle Yonder—as well as in Stefanovich’s solo encore—and as dedicatee of Benjamin’s Concerto for Orchestra would surely have approved of the programming, which also took in Purcell and Stravinsky. I imagine Pierre Boulez, Benjamin’s friend, mentor, and fellow Messiaen pupil, would have done too.

Knussen’s ‘pot-pourri’ from his opera Higglety Pigglety Pop! made for a delightful curtain-raiser, akin to the traditional overture. Exquisite craft was revealed in a performance both detailed and atmospheric, atmosphere revealed to be very much a creature of detail. I seem to recall Benjamin, Knussen’s efforts notwithstanding, to have admitted a lack of affinity with Schoenberg’s twelve-note music. (I may be imagining that; please forgive if so.) Whatever the truth of that, Schoenberg’s serial shadow fell generatively here, as, at least I felt, did the colouristic influence of his op.16 Five Orchestral Pieces. Ravel and Mussorgsky—the bells—seemed present too. The music, in any case, spoke of enchanting danger and, perhaps, parallel dangerous enchantment. A world played and danced before us, before closing in mystery, albeit a different mystery from that with which the piece had begun.

 

Three Consorts transcribes, as you might expect, three of Purcell’s viol consorts for chamber orchestra. In the first, the Six-Part In Nomine in G minor, strings, gravely beautiful, were gradually joined by other instruments: first a pair of trombones, next a pair of trumpets, then other woodwind and bells (tubular and Korean temple). Restrained and respectful in the best sense, the transcription not only permitted Purcell’s music to unfold as if by itself, but played a crucial part in the set of three considered as a whole. The second, the seventh of Purcell’s Fantazias (previously transcribed by Benjamin for chamber ensemble, unless I am mistaken), earlier scoring sounded as if it had been turned inside out, almost as if we now heard the skeleton on the outside and flesh within. A more overtly modernist glassy sound, when heard, seemed to evoke the world of Benjamin’s opera Written on Skin, or rather take angelic inspiration from there. (The MCO, it may be noted, gave the premiere of that opera.) Other refractions surprised and even reassured. I am not quite sure how Benjamin or the players had a pair of horns sound so Purcellian, yet they did, uncannily so. The third and final movement, the Fantazia Upon One Note, relished and communicated Purcell’s conceit. It was the most ‘colourful’ in the usual orchestral sense of the three too: good-natured, almost (I thought, bizarrely) Christmassy. But that was only the beginning. Things were not quite as they seemed. Bowed percussion and a darker, graver interlude were never quite dispelled by the return to Technicolor. Wonderful!

 

Angular play with Webern, in particular, was the name of the game—and game it is—in Movements. Process and play were felt almost as if we were hearing a successor work to the second book of Boulez’s Structures, which in a way we are. (It is surely no coincidence that Tamara Stefanovich has performed that music so memorably with Pierre-Laurent Aimard.) Timbre, needless to say, continued to be a preoccupation. Whatever the apparent similarities with Webern, Boulez, or Schoenberg, this could only ever be Stravinsky; a single flute note could—and did—tell us that, as did the particular gravity of a trio of trombones and that ever-strange use of violins. Piano phrasing was in every sense vital, ensuring that serial chess moves—however odd this may sound—sang. So too was a sense of chamber music engagement between soloist and other musicians, in which both Stefanovich and the MCO excelled. What expression there is here in a single gesture. The relation of the five movements to each other was a crucial part of the jigsaw too: there was straightforward rightness to how they fit together. And pitch repetition proved fathomlessly expressive toward the end, connecting intriguingly with Purcell.

 

As a generous encore, Stefanovich gave us Knussen’s Prayer Bell Sketch, op.29. If its opening gesture seemed to emerge from what we had just heard, the music went in a very different direction thereafter: more sustained, even Debussyan, not only in attack and reverberation, but also in spacing and even harmony. This was both a gentler and more sensual, yet constantly surprising journey.

 

Woodwind, soon joined by strings, announced Benjamin’s Concerto for Orchestra. The darkness of this opening had me almost tempted to think this a ‘Covid work’, though the dates of composition, 2019-21, suggest an earlier conception. Perhaps Bartók’s work of the same name offered something of a precedent in that regard, though the path it takes is quite different. Benjamin honoured precedent in permitting members of the orchestra, both as soloists and in (Bartókian) pairs, their moments in the limelight, but that felt entirely natural, never merely for the sake of the genre. Were there shards of Knussen too? Was that even a figure from, or at least with kinship to Stravinsky’s Dumbarton Oaks? Almost certainly not, but there were perhaps connections with Stravinsky worth exploring on another occasion. More to the point than any alleged influence, viral or musical, this was a work extending the emotional soundworld of Benjamin’s third opera, Lessons in Love and Violence. A good deal of anguished tutti writing, by the standards both of composer and genre, led to a closing sense of magical stitching that perhaps did pay tribute to Knussen after all. Whatever the case of that may be, Benjamin ensured a fully satisfying sense of wholeness was cast in retrospect on the work even on a first hearing.

 

Benjamin’s performance of Stravinsky’s Pulcinella Suite was puzzling: at first quite disconcerting, and not only because it took ears some time to adjust, but ultimately provocative and even revealing. The first two movements seemed to lack bite but that appeared to be strategy rather than failure, especially in the ‘Serenata’ where Stravinsky’s extraordinary orchestration (perhaps in the light of Benjamin’s reworking of Purcell) sounded stranger than ever. It was not so much a matter of Benjamin remoulding Stravinsky in his own image as offering a composer’s insight as conductor such as one rarely hears. (Again, both Knussen and Boulez sprang to mind.) Likewise the ‘Scherzino’ seemed reheard through late Stravinsky, perhaps Knussen too. For there was certainly rhythmic bite where Benjamin decided there should be, aggressively so in the ‘Tarantella’, almost to the exclusion of anything else. The second half of the suite seemed to react necessarily as well as charmingly to that high watermark. Again, the sheer strangeness of Stravinsky’s—and the orchestra’s—colours confounded in the ‘Gavotta con due variazioni’. Flute (Chiara Tonelli) and bassoons (Guilhaume Santana and Pierre Gomes) were very much cases in point in the second variation. Benjamin’s ear for timbre communicated a vision for the first part of the final movement darker and, I think, slower than I can recall hearing before. That made final release all the more joyous and necessary.

Musikfest Berlin (4) - Ensemble Modern/Benjamin - Benjamin and Rihm, 3 September 2020

 

Philharmonie

© Monika Karczmarczyk / Berliner Festspiele

Benjamin: At First Light (1982)
Rihm: Jagden und Formen (1995-2001, 2008 version)


Ensemble Modern

George Benjamin (conductor)

George Benjamin returned to the Musikfest Berlin to conduct, in typically excellent performances, Ensemble Modern in one of his early works, At First Light, and the 2008 version (Zustand, more literally ‘state’ or ‘status’) of Wolfgang Rihm’s Jagden und Formen. These were pieces, at least it seemed to me at first, that offered contrast more than exemplification of an idea, but there is nothing wrong with that. On reflection, however, I began to make connections after all, intended or otherwise. It was instructive to be reminded once again of Benjamin’s breadth of musical sympathies, leading here in a direction I should not necessarily have suspected, as well as to step back from his more recent, often operatic output, to a piece from his (near-)Wunderkind years.


At First Light opened in a world of ever-changing liminality, against which fanfares made an unmistakeable mark, almost as if entering from another world. La Mer in reverse? Perhaps, not least given the Turner painting, Norham Castle, Sunrise, which lay behind Benjamin’s inspiration for the work: ‘the way,’ he once wrote, ‘in which solid objects – fields, cows, and the castle itself – virtually appear to have melted under the intense sunlight.’ The impression is different at first light, of course, but the distinction between object and haze still appeared to play a role, both in work and performance. The pristine quality of sounds, both alone and in combination – for instance, minor thirds – seemed here just as important as the undeniable complexity of combinations throughout the fourteen-strong chamber orchestra. Memories of one glorious moment, when instruments and players came together as if a consort in the sky, will remain with me long.


Rihm’s Jagden und Formen likewise lived up to, and expanded our notions, of what its title implied: ‘hunts and forms’. By coincidence, I had visited earlier in the day the old Jagdschloss (hunting lodge) in the Grunewald, the oldest Hohenzollern castle remaining in Berlin. This, however, seemed to be an altogether more ferocious hunt than that implied in the Renaissance clearing by the lake. An opening battle between two fiddlers offered resonances aplenty, more strings and later other instruments entering, yet at first in a role more akin to commentary. In time, however, more hunts and forms were incited, even ignited, forms unquestionably created before our ears: perhaps an attempt to control the wildness of the hunt; or, just as likely, a way for it to extend its reach. If there was perhaps something of Henze – König Hirsch or The Bassarids, for instance – to some points of departure, they were soon left behind; that may have been more a matter of my ears seeking orientation in a new work (to me) rather than of anything more ‘objective’. A crazy duet between cor anglais and viola, other instruments providing ever-shifting background – kinship with Benjamin’s piece after all? – lingered in my recollections, but there were many such concerto-for-orchestra-like partnerships of the moment. Was there a sense of persistent frustration, perhaps of the metaphorical quarry escaping? Or was the point more the thrill of the chase? Why choose? Metamorphosis through infectious energy was the order of the day, nowhere more so than in the outstanding musicianship heard from the Frankfurt players. I sensed a strangely Mahlerian mood toward the close, disrupted by further fury, and then a sudden falling into the distance. All was over for another day, but it had been quite a ride. Time to rest, then, before another ‘first light’.

Wiget/Ensemble Modern/Benjamin - Boulez, Messiaen, Ustvolskaya, Ligeti, and Benjamin, 6 March 2019

Roundhouse, Camden

Boulez: Initiale

Messiaen: Sept haïkai

Ustvolskaya: Composition no.2, ‘Dies irae’

Ligeti: Ramifications

Benjamin: Palimpsests

Ueli Wiget (piano)

Ensemble Modern

George Benjamin (conductor)

Pierre Boulez’s Initiale was chosen to inaugurate Berlin’s Pierre Boulez Saal almost two years ago to the day. If not quite inaugurating the Roundhouse, home to what seem to have been some of Boulez’s most memorable concerts during his time with the BBC, it nonetheless offered a fitting fanfare to the Wigmore Hall’s new series of new music concerts there. George Benjamin and the Ensemble Modern had given splendid performances ‘at home’ on Wigmore Street the previous night. Here the ensemble was in full orchestral form, at least for three of the five pieces, though none is conventionally scored by late-Romantic standards. Initiale, in any case, is for brass septet. I had imagined, foolishly, that the instruments might, in homage to Gabrieli et al., have been placed around us. The hall is on the large side for that, whatever might have worked in Berlin. In both this and Messiaen’s Sept haïkai, my ears took a while to adjust to the acoustic, but there was nevertheless much to be gleaned in this miniature masterclass in typically Boulezian proliferation. It left one wanting more – which, in a way, we received – from Boulez’s teacher.

Messaien seems to have become strangely unfashionable at the moment; perhaps he awaits ‘rediscovery’. He unquestionably deserves it. Boulez had conducted the 1963 premiere, with Yvonne Loriod at the piano. I had a few doubts, especially to start with, concerning this performance, but again I think the need to adjust to the acoustic may have been the real enemy here. Ueli Wiget certainly relished the virtuosity of the piano part, especially in the extraordinary cadenza-like passages, their roots very much in nineteenth-century pianism, quite transformed here by the unmistakeable voice and imagination of this most singular of composers. Benjamin had the measure – in more than one sense – of the music’s varying metrical demands, quite rightly making light of them, art concealing art. Birds sang, chimes sounded, vistas were made manifest before our eyes and ears, synaesthetic or otherwise.

Perhaps the greatest surprise on the programme was Galina Ustvolskaya’s Composition no.2, ‘Dies irae’, for eight double basses, percussion (a huge wooden block), and piano. The word ‘uncompromising’ is all too readily reached for, both generally and specifically, but is almost impossible to avoid here. I was surprised both by Benjamin’s inclusion of the work and indeed by the power with which it struck me, neither he nor I necessarily being the most obvious audience for this music. Its starkness, its unswerving faith, its economy of means provided many points of comparison and contrast with Messiaen’s music. Neither is music with which one argues; or, if one does, one will come off the worse. Performances, nicely lodged between ritual and drama – I even thought briefly, however incongruously, of Parsifal – likewise brooked no dissent. For me, this perhaps proved the revelation, a decidedly un-Boulezian revelation, of the programme.

Whereas I had thought Ustvolskaya’s piece might have been the one to stand out oddly from the rest of the programme, it was actually Ligeti’s Ramifications I had more trouble placing in context with the others. Perhaps it was chosen simply as a work Boulez had performed here in those earlier Roundhouse concerts. It hardly mattered, in any case. Whether it were my ears or the playing that had now properly adjusted, or both, I do not know; what I do know is that Ligeti’s masterwork registered with great clarity and drama. Benjamin and his players, as well as the score ‘itself’, drew one in, compelled one to listen – to listen in ways one could never have imagined, even if one had actually approached them before. The differences in tuning between string groups proved so richly expressive that one never so much as noticed the lack of metre in a conventional sense. (Perhaps that was the definite contrast with the works preceding?) Swarming string plainsong – its reimagination, at any rate, if only by me – reinvented tradition before our ears.

Benjamin’s own Palimpsests was written for Boulez and the LSO – who, if memory serves correctly, had vividly relished the challenges. (How could they not?) Both movements – ‘Palimpsest I’ and ‘Palimpsest II’, the first originally performed as a stand-alone work – recreate not only vertically but horizontally the drama of rediscovery, of rereading a succession of manuscript texts. So, at least, it sounded here, in splendidly committed performances. A brass interjection here, a seraphic flight of fancy there played with ideas of what was and what might have been: all part of a whole that yet depended upon the call of the moment. Some, at least, of the roots of Written on Skin sounded uncommonly apparent: emotionally as well as intellectually, whatever the fallacy of the dichotomy. Was such writing and rewriting not, after all, one of the points both of programme and performance?

Ensemble Modern/Benjamin - Milliken, Mason, Dallapiccola, and Benjamin, 5 March 2019

Wigmore Hall

Cathy Milliken: Bright Ring (UK premiere)

Christian Mason: Layers of Love

Dallapiccola: Piccola musica notturna

Benjamin: Into the Little Hill

Anu Komsi (soprano)

Helena Rasker (contralto)
Ensemble Modern

George Benjamin (conductor)

This week, the Wigmore Hall presents two concerts from George Benjamin and Frankfurt’s Ensemble Modern, the first ‘at home’ on Wigmore Street, the second moving north to Camden’s Roundhouse. For the first, we heard Benjamin’s now classic first opera, Into the Little Hill, prefaced by three ensemble works by Cathy Milliken, Christian Mason, and, for the evening’s spot of ‘early music’, Luigi Dallapiccola.

An Ensemble Modern commission, here receiving its United Kingdom premiere, Milliken’s Bright Ring spoke, to quote the composer, of ‘fields of energy that I perceived whilst performing with the Ensemble Modern,’ an energy ‘of collaboration and interaction, whether pulsing or still (or both)’. I initially read such lines with a degree of scepticism, but having heard the piece, they made a good deal of sense, the idea furthered by the title reference to the line, ‘Bright is the ring of words’, from a Robert Louis Stevenson poem, and the rings of Saturn. Two violins vied with each other at the opening, joined by viola and intermittently others, in music that seemed to depict and/or express both pent-up rhythmic violence and something (ring-like?) more numinous, often led by flute or tuned percussion. There was, I think, a sense of something akin to an extra-terrestrial landscape and narrative, not in a filmic way, but perhaps more akin to the tone poems of the past. The close, in which a flickering cello line initiated a final explosion, thereafter subsiding, seemed once again to encapsulate that tension between ensemble and solo instrument, planet and ring, pulse and its withdrawal.

Christian Mason’s 2015 Layers of Love, written for and recorded by Klangforum Wien, announced itself with slithering, mysterious microtones. Movement in various ways, rhythmic and harmonic, was initially slow and hard won, yet undeniable. There was a strangeness that seemed more of this world than Milliken’s other, but I am not sure I could explain what, practically, I mean by that. Certainly there was drama, albeit less pictorial than in the previous work. More than once, Bernd Alois Zimmermann came to my mind: again, I am not entirely sure why, but think it may have had something to do with the ultimately achieved rhythms and their relationship to sound, not least from the double bass.

Dallapiccola’s Piccola musica notturna spoke with the distilled mastery of a true classic, as perfectly formed in work and performance as a piece by Mozart, Schoenberg, or Debussy. Indeed, rather to my surprise, I found something naggingly Debussyan, if only in correspondence, to the turns of several phrases, however different the serial method one could hear and feel as clearly as if chez Schoenberg or his pupils. It was not difficult to understand what might have attracted Benjamin to so exquisitely logical, warmly expressive a miniature. If ever there were a composer whose music we should hear far more often…

I had last heard Into the Little Hill only in September, in Berlin, also conducted by the composer, albeit with the Mahler Chamber Orchestra. Its small performing forces (two vocal soloists and ensemble), formal perfection, and dramatic power render it a highly attractive work for regular performance, whether on stage or in concert; yet possession of such qualities does not always translate into such (relative) popularity. In this case, as with Benjamin’s two subsequent, larger-scale operas, Written on Skin and Lessons of Love and Violence, it is heartening to report that widespread enthusiasm continues. Stravinskian incision, violence, and economy, marked the opening – not just for itself, but as the opening to this complete (compleat) drama of modern political life, more bitingly relevant, so it seems, with every hearing. Whether it were the cool hieratic (Symphonies of Wind Instruments?) quality to the Minister’s addressing the crowd; the latter’s controlled yet increasing hysteria; the deathly tension of electric woodwind lines as the Minister meets the Stranger; or the latter’s wheedling, seductive way (heightened no end by Anu Komsi in particular, likewise her bloodcurdling cries ‘Swear by your sleeping child’): one could have cut the air with a knife – and that only in the first scenes to Part One.

As so often, operatic mastery shows itself particularly in the interludes between scenes. What a composer says and does not, unconstrained by words and indeed voices, will often – not always – penetrate to the heart of his or her musical dramaturgy. Such was certainly the case here, both in work and performance; so too in orchestral writing and playing elsewhere, as for instance in the terror of the intricately inviting processional that underlies the scene between Mother and Child. ‘The rats will stream like hot metal to the rim of the world.’ Indeed, they would – and did. A similar observation might be made of the division into two parts, the latter’s opening sounding and feeling strongly as if a new act, as if marking the return from an interval for the opera’s final, fatal events to unfold. ‘And music?’ ‘All music – smiles the minister – is incidental.’ Not at all. For the true rodent ghosts were now in the machine; so too, led by far-from-incidental music, was the child whose grasping, mendacious politician of a father had stolen its future. The will of the people had been enacted: The Little Hill meant The Little Hill.

Musikfest Berlin (1) – Isabelle Faust and friends; MCO/Benjamin: Schoenberg and Benjamin, 12 September 2018

Kammermusiksaal

Schoenberg: Verklärte Nacht, op.4

Benjamin: Into the Little Hill

Isabelle Faust, Anne Katharina Schreiber (violins)

Antoine Tamesit, Danusha Waskiewicz (violas)

Christian Poltéra, Jean-Guihen Queyras (cellos)

Susanna Andersson (soprano)

Krisztina Szabó (mezzo-soprano)

Mahler Chamber Orchestra

George Benjamin (conductor)

Image: © Adam Janisch 

Schoenberg and Benjamin offered a fine welcome back from Berlin and its September Musikfest to a prodigal son – especially so since, only the previous day, I had both received the first proofs for my Schoenberg biography and heard an excellent paper from George Haggett on Benjamin’s Written on Skin at OBERTO’s annual conference. Truth be told, there was for me little in the way of obvious connection between the two works on offer, save for the question of narration, brought very much to the fore in Martin Crimp’s libretto for Benjamin’s Into the Little Hill, yet also surely apparent in Verklärte Nacht. Who is telling this story – and on what authority? Two very different genres, composers, ensembles, musical styles and languages nevertheless elicited two memorable performances, Into the Little Hill outstandingly so.

Schoenberg’s tone poem for string sextet – we should never forget that radicalism in itself, already seeking to reconcile and to renew Wagner and Brahms – opened, if not quite on the verge of audibility, then soft, mysterious enough to make us listen: pointing ahead to Webern, even to Nono. Christian Poltéra’s solo cello, soon joined by other ‘lower’ strings – can they really be lower when they make up four out of six? – proved febrile, indicative of human fragility, although certainly never fragile in a performative sense. Violins, especially Isabelle Faust, sometimes seemed more overtly keen to evoke elements of what may – or may not – be ‘period’ practice. Portamento was, at least initially, more in evidence from them, vibrato somewhat sparing. Led by Jean-Guihen Queyras and Antoine Tamesit, nocturnal blossoming thereby provoked proved a rare, even breathtaking treat. Not that any one of these musicians was ‘leading’ the music-making for more than a few bars: this is chamber music and so it sounded.

The violence of Benjamin’s opera was certainly prefigured at times in musico-narrative gestures in the Schoenberg’s performance, pizzicato anything but soothing. Narrative, moreover, was unquestionably to the fore, questioning whatever distinctions we might make between ‘musical’ and ‘poetic’ concerns. Twists and turns in individual lines aurally suggested those of a Jugendstil drawing, leaves, branches, lightness, and darkness of the forest, both material and metaphysical, emerging and transforming before our ears. Bar a patch of decidedly wayward intonation from Faust, the lack of smoothness was decidedly to be welcomed, each line seemingly re-thought, even re-composed according to the needs of the moment. The moment of change, of transformation was undeniable with Queyras’s cello solo. I felt a sense of transfiguration less: perhaps that was the point. In its particular materialism, not least in the vibrato-less moonlit silver of the close, this performance seemed to declare affinity with and distance from the orchestral tone poems of Strauss.

Schoenberg’s supposed antipode, Stravinsky was present, or so it sounded, in the opening of Into the Little Hill. Symphonies of Wind Instruments and Friends one might almost have called it. Moreover, soon it became clear that voices, even voices with words, might act instrumentally – take Krisztina Szabó’s use of consonants in ‘The Minister and the Crowd’ – as well as vice versa. All along, one heard both in work and performance a chiselled precision from Benjamin – who also conducted – that might, I suppose, be likened to Stravinsky (or Ravel, or many other composers), but which is without question the composer’s own. The precise choice of note, duration, timbre speaks for itself, whatever it might ‘mean’. An almost unbearably suspenseful scene between The Minister and The Stranger, the latter’s evil seduction both verbal (Susanna Andersson) and instrumental, made as powerful a dramatic, political point as if it had been staged.

The quiet tension of silence proved just as telling at that pivotal scene’s close, the shifty politician having sworn on his sleeping child: ‘unlike your god/unlike your word/unlike your smile/-[he] is innocent’. It was, though, the quiet tension of music, of musical processes, generated and generative, in the ensuing Interlude: it did what needed – what someone alleged was needed – to be done. ‘Why must the rats die, Mummy?’ The will of the people, in reality the satisfaction of the mob, would now be put into effect.

And so, in Part Two, the Minister re-elected, we could look or rather hear inside his head. There was an excellent, truly dramatic sense of a second ‘act’, of time having passed: Stravinskian sonorities once again reborn, fatally so. ‘And music?’ asked the Stranger upon his return. ‘All music – smiles the minister – is incidental.’ Is it really? The darkness of the eighth scene for ‘Mother(s) and Child(ren)’ was all too real, ghosts – burrowing children inside the Little Hill – in Benjamin’s machine likewise. ‘The deeper we burrow the brighter his music burns. Can’t you see? Can’t you see? Can’t you see?’

Lessons in Love and Violence, Royal Opera, 15 May 2018

Royal Opera House

King – Stéphane Degout

Gaveston, Stranger – Gyula Orendt

Isabel – Barbara Hannigan

Mortimer – Peter Hoare

Boy, Young King – Samuel Boden

Girl – Ocean Barrington-Cook

Witness 1, Singer 1, Woman 1 – Jennifer France

Witness 2, Singer 2, Woman 2 – Krisztina Szabó

Witness 3, Madman – Andri Björn Róbertsson

Katie Mitchell (director)

Vicki Mortimer (designs)

James Farncombe (lighting)

Joseph Alford (movement, associate director)

Orchestra of the Royal Opera House

George Benjamin (conductor)

Girl (Ocean Barrington-Cook), Isabel (Barbara Hannigan), King (Stéphane Degout), Boy (Samuel Boden)
Images: © ROH 2018/Stephen Cummiskey

 

If Harrison Birtwistle remains acknowledged as England’s greatest musical dramatist since Purcell, then Lessons in Love and Violence may well come to be seen as the work with which George Benjamin mounted his challenge. There is no reason, of course, why such matters should be adversarial, and such is hardly Benjamin’s style, whatever the grisly subject matter of his third opera. He is more someone to knock on the door, enter and delight us with what he brings to the party, without any need to elbow anyone aside. Let us instead rejoice in the creation of another masterpiece, darker and perhaps deeper still than Written on Skin. (Not, of course, that we should forget Benjamin’s first opera either: the wonderful Into the Little Hill.)

As you will doubtless know by now, Benjamin has been reunited with Martin Crimp for this, Crimp’s third libretto, and Katie Mitchell, who directed the excellent first staging of Written on Skin, and who has also worked with Crimp on his other theatrical works, has rejoined the team too. This seems, almost a priori, to have given rise to a degree of ennui in certain quarters. (I have tried to avoid hearing what others have thought about the work, but have not been entirely successful.) One objection seems to have been ‘more of the same’, more or less. I can only presume that the same people would have regretted Mozart’s decision to ‘pursue a collaboration’ with Lorenzo da Ponte after Don Giovanni, perhaps even after Figaro. After all, one often hears the most ridiculous nonsense spoken of Così fan tutte. But there is no reason to be defensive here; I only mention the matter since, for better or worse, it is being spoken of already. Upon leaving the theatre, I hastily typed an ‘instant reaction’ tweet, even, for once, remembering to use the ‘hashtag’: ‘#ROHLessons is a towering masterpiece, its intellectual brilliance and sensual wonders matched, at the very least, by its emotionally overwhelming dramatic path. Drained and satisfied as if by Wozzeck or Katya Kabanova; or, the work that increasingly came to mind, Boris Godunov.’ I have no argument with that almost a day later, and shall try to explain why.

Are such comparisons less odious than ridiculous? Perhaps. Not entirely, though, since I think this is how we often approach new works, not least in so repertory-bound a genre as opera, perhaps especially with a house and company such as the Royal Opera (House). They are far from exact and the tragic trajectory is not the same; here, in the story of Edward II, it is nicely doubled at the end. Essentially we see (and hear) here Edward’s (never, I think named as such) inability to say no to his lover, Gaveston, resulting in the banishment of the clever, unscrupulous politician, Mortimer, who returns, having manipulated the people to his end, to restore himself in something equivalent to a queen’s coup, ridding the court and realm first of Gaveston and then of the king. But the young king, again not named as Edward III, having watched, with his sister, everything unfold, including that violence which is often yet not always subtly hinted at or stylised, turns upon the usurpers and truly becomes king himself.

Boy, Girl, Isabel

Tragedy or restoration? That rightly does not quite seem to be the question, just as that bald outline omits the mess of motivations that characterises this horrible, political world. Much is hinted at, there for one to join the dots, but much is portrayed too. The audience member is, rightly or wrongly, treated as an intelligent human being, a participant, not a consumer of Verdi or other tedious kitsch. It is certainly not so straightforward as portraying a situation in which no one is sympathetic. Rather, as in ‘real life’ – and what, alas, could be more real than our present, not so different high or low ‘political’ life? – motivations are complex, contradictory, and, between characters at least, irreconcilable. Such is surely not the least of the lessons of love and violence that unfold – whether one does not believe in love, as Mortimer, or in violence, as the younger young king does not, yet must. Mortimer, after all, schools him, too, perhaps better than he intended. Likewise, Isabel seems – perhaps is – wronged at the start; we can understand why she, a mother and a wife as well as a queen, acts as she does. Yet she is far from white to start with; in her aestheticism – her love of music and her chilling dissolution of a pearl in acid, a pearl that would have given houses to petitioning subjects – she actually seems a good, or rather deadly, match to her husband, as well as a potential rival to Gaveston. There is horror, too, in her children turning upon her, however deserved that turnaround might be.

But we must return to music, so beloved of these unpleasant people, yet puritanically or sadistically prohibited by the Young King. (Or so he claims: we never quite know the truth of many claims, for who is narrating? We almost seem to know better in the play within a play, that of David and Jonathan, in which Isabel almost literally begins to call the shots, and in the non-musical reprise of such ‘entertainment’ which is threatened, and yet which turns out to be ‘real’, a tortured Mortimer about to be shot dead by the Young King’s sister.) Yes, we must, that too lengthy parenthesis notwithstanding. For it is music that seems – apparently or otherwise – to structure the words and the drama, or perhaps to re-structure them. It is music that creates them, in many ways, regardless of empirical priority. It also creates, and is created by, the situation: its colour, its tensions, its possibilities. ‘It’, whatever it may be, is always, ultimately, about the music; for when the music stops, so does the opera. Perhaps that has always been Isabel’s fear: the fall of the curtain. Mitchell certainly seems to hint at that, but so do Benjamin and Crimp – and, of course, the outstanding cast and orchestra.

Madman (Andri Björn Róbertsson) restrained, Queen, Girl, Boy, Mortimer (Peter Hoare)

Benjamin’s ability to create a sound world has always been one of his hallmarks; in that sense I could not help but think of Janáček and Mussorgsky, both in general and in particular, as mentioned above. Yet, as with those composers, it is certainly not a matter of simply providing atmosphere, a setting, although that certainly is created. Just as Vicki Mortimer’s plush, power-dressing – dressing itself becomes, in true royal fashion, almost a ritual in itself – claustrophobic designs, both for sets and costumes, provide a framework, both to contain and to be broken by the action, so do timbres, often in combination, and harmonies, likewise. There is almost infinite variegation within. The old problem, almost yet not quite Schoenbergian, of reconciling musical antimonies between freedom and determinism, gains new clothes – aural and visual. And the inevitability of the action, at least viewed from the close, of what has happened, takes upon itself an almost Bergian thrust, not least through the characters of and connections between particular scenes. The orchestra follows Benjamin, whether as composer or conductor; or rather, it leads the action with all the confidence and, more to the point, understanding it might once have shown Bernard Haitink in Wagner. And, as with Wagner, still more so with the Debussy of Pelléas, so much action, so much of the truest, wordless action, occurs in the interludes, the transformations between scenes. It is perhaps in those, as in Pelléas, that the stature of Benjamin as a musical dramatist is most immediately manifest.

Or does it? Does the orchestra lead? Do not the singers? Yes, they do too. There is much leadership: too much in the plot, just enough in performance. For song, or at least singing, is crucial to this opera; it is certainly not to be defined as a ravishing, horrifying symphonic poem with voices, although it is perhaps partly that. Benjamin and his co-creators and co-performers refuse the either-or that many of us, seeking for a way in to account for our reactions, would seek to foist upon him. There is drama in melisma: what could be more traditionally operatic than that? There is drama in the entwining and the opposition of melisma? Again, what could take us back more closely to that first zenith of the genre, to Monteverdi? Perhaps the encounter between Isabel and Gaveston, in which she verbally bids him come closer to her, that she might also come closer to the King (who remains distant on stage), is most instructive of all here, for it expresses and creates a musico-dramatic situation more complex than, and still more deadly than, the duet of two baritones so full of sensual delight between the king himself and his lover. Both, and other duets and ensembles, are necessary of course, in the structuring of the drama, just as in the still sorely misunderstood Così. Post-Mozartian Harmoniemusik occasionally seemed to make that point, at least to me; likewise the haunting death rattle avant la lettre emanating from harps and cimbalom, as the Stranger took the King’s life in his cell. The King thought this stranger was Gaveston; so did we, even though he told us he was not, and Gaveston was dead. One could hardly fail to think of the careful, meaningful symmetries of Lulu.

Isabel and Mortimer

And, as with Mozart, although whether through design or through the sheer excellence of these artists on stage, one had the sense that the roles had been written with them in mind. They were, of course, for Mozart, but here, who knows? We are not so much concerned with process, as with each artist having inhabited his or her role. Stéphane Degout’s velvet tones cloaked the impetuous, arbitrary deeds of a weak tyrant, who was also a wronged and wronging man. One made no distinction between role and performance; he simply was the King. So too, and increasingly so, as her role came into focus, was Barbara Hannigan, as his consort. That she played so well in the initial background speaks just as well of her as the display of that extraordinary ability we all know and love – think, for instance, of her Ligeti – to encompass so many modes of vocal delivery within a single line that remains spun from the same silk. Gyula Orendt’s seductive, nasty, manipulative way with Gaveston mirrored and contested the politician’s path of Peter Hoare’s clever, calculating, just as (in)human Mortimer. Not the least of the evening’s performances was the coming of age through politico-emotional stunting of Samuel Boden’s Boy and Young King. Dressed like a boy, he acted unerringly like one too: almost a Prince William, whilst Diana was still around, or shortly after. Ably assisted by his sister, Ocean Barrington-Cook (a mute role), the crown was, again if only in retrospect, his for the taking – once he had learned his deathly lessons. Smaller roles were all very well taken, by Jennifer France, Krisztina Szabó, and Andri Björn Róbertsson: suggestive of a greater number of voices and faces than was actually present, drawn, as it were, as if from an imaginary chorus.

Isabel, King, Gaveston (Gyula Orendt)

For, as in Boris, we observed and felt the people’s grief, feared equally for what we knew to be their largely hopeless future. As the Third Witness had accused the Queen, in a shocking intrusion, orchestrated by Mortimer, into her chamber, the poor had no choice, unlike the decadent rich, to sleep three to a bed. The miracle here was that fury, both external and internal to the drama of princes and nobles, manifested itself through three single voices, an orchestra, and, not least, an endlessly inventive, supportive, and questioning production. Mitchell too did the work the necessary honour of treating it as a mature drama, as she had in Written in Skin; this was not something to be introduced, hesitantly, but to be directed with the critical modernity she would bring to any other work. This may be a quiet operatic manifesto; such, as discussed, is Benjamin’s way. It may even be a manifesto without intention to be a manifesto. Perhaps that makes it all the more convincing, all the more accomplished.