NYO/Adès - Liszt, Adès, and Berlioz, 8 August 2026

Royal Albert Hall

Liszt: Mephisto Waltz no.1, S.110/2
Adès: Dante: Part 2, ‘Purgatorio’
Berlioz: Symphonie fantastique, op.14

National Youth Orchestra

Thomas Adès (conductor)

Images:  BBC / Chris Christodoulou

To hear the National Youth Orchestra is always a treat. The enthusiasm of young musicians, not a cynical bone in their bodies, can hardly be gainsaid; but enthusiasm will only get one so far. These musicians have technical and musical capabilities beyond their years; many will have professional careers ahead of them. Just look at the NYO’s alumni. They will have many more rehearsals than a professional orchestra could every hope for. (Eat your heart out, Celibidache!) There is also the sheer joy of hearing an orchestra of this size too, again unaffordable on the professional scene for almost anything but Gurrelieder—and often not even then. Berlioz knew a true orchestral pianissimo required a far greater body of musicians than one was ever likely to hear, rendering his works either utopian or unperformable or, on some measure, inadequately performed in reality. What we hear today from ‘period’ and ‘modern’ orchestras alike, whatever the ideological claims of the latter, will almost always fall short of what he required. Such is life, at least under capitalism. We stretch our resources to breaking-point and beyond, and ultimately make do with less than perfection; otherwise, we should hear nothing at all. It was nonetheless a treat to hear the Symphonie fantastique played with musicians within the range of his expectation, if still towards the lower end (albeit with more powerful, modern instruments). 

Before that, the first half of this concert conducted by Thomas Adès offered music by Liszt and Adès himself. The greatest musical avant-gardist of the nineteenth century, Liszt was stranger neither to ideas nor to practice in the realm of musical ‘progress’: neither on the piano nor the orchestra, inventing for the latter the new genre of the symphonic poem. So important were they to Wagner that he actually played down some of his own prior innovation, here strictly preceding that of Liszt, so as to incorporate Liszt’s poems into his musico-historical schema. The first Mephisto Waltz has a not dissimilar conception, reminding us that there were orchestral works before Liszt, as there have been many after, that may not strictly be classified in that way, but which at least come close. (Ask Berlioz, for one.) No one writes – plays, listens – in a vacuum. Coming to this music for the first time or the hundredth – the latter unlikely, for we hear it far less often than we might – no one would have failed to register the NYO’s musical, indeed human energy from the conductor’s first downbeat, indeed before that too. Unanimity of sound, but also of purpose, reached through collaboration rather than dictatorship, was apparent here and throughout the entire concert, whether in the opening phrase or the whirlwind that ensued, string crescendi a remarkable case in point (more difficult than they might sound). It was quite a ride for all of us. Handling the sudden change of tempo for the love music is a difficult task: how to ensure necessary contrast but also ‘symphonic’ continuity. If Adès proved stronger in the former than the latter, there was nonetheless much to admire and be thrilled by—especially in the return to full throttle. Moreover, all orchestral solos were taken exquisitely (again, very much the case throughout the concert). 

Adès’s ballet Dante was written for the Royal Opera House and Opéra de Paris for the septcentenary of Dante’s birth. Here we heard the second of its three parts, ‘Purgatorio’. Its performance seemed once again to be outstanding, NYO musicians clearly relishing the opportunity to work with a composer on his music, in a performance it is difficult to imagine being surpassed. I felt decidedly ambivalent to it as music, though, a promising opening leading to outright bathos. The first six of its seven sections contains recorded material: baqashot chants, as revealed in Edward Venn’s useful note, connecting both with the composer’s family history and themes in Dante. They were fascinating to hear, as was, at the music’s best, their incitement to and/or emergence from orchestral material, be it for solo instruments, groups, or something approaching a full ensemble. I am not sure the writing always escapes orientalism, arguably all the more pronounced in frequent combination – almost as if we had not progressed from Saint-Saëns – of tonality and ‘fantastic’, ‘Oriental’ colouring. The microtones of the ‘real thing’ had considerably more intrinsic character. Despite the tendency towards film music, one could imagine it danced—and that was of course part of the point. 

There were certainly thrills to be heard when we reached the final ‘Ascent’ in ten horns or five trombones standing together to play. When joined by bells, though, the score ended up sounding uncomfortably close to a television ‘Christmas special’. It made a noise, as did the orchestra, but beyond that? Wagner advised Liszt not to write a ‘Paradiso’ movement for his Dante Symphony, declaring depiction of paradise beyond the powers of music: advice Liszt wisely heeded, substituting a ‘Magnificat’. Given the nature of this musical approach, I think I shall similarly refrain as listener. Whatever my misgivings, a poorly-behaved audience – slurping ice cream, dropping things on the floor, taking phone calls, air conducting, and more – loved it. 

And so, to Berlioz, gifts of conductor and orchestra united in a performance that threatened to raise the roof even of the Albert Hall, yet lacked nothing in subtle detail. The first movement received as fine a performance as I can recall for a long time, its introduction barely registering as such, but rather as one stage, full of potential yet equally absorbing on its own terms, in an ever-developing, shortish symphonic poem of its own. NYO energy could be experienced as coming direct not only from the players but their instruments: testimony to Adès’s wise stewardship in pursuit of Berlioz’s goals. I was especially intrigued by the darker corners, timbre, harmony, tempo, and more united in production of colour and motion. All manner of shades between them and the composer’s signature manic Romanticism made for another captivating journey, as did a graceful, yet at-times-menacing second-movement ball, here given with cornet solo. (Truth be told, I prefer it without, but in this context, it would have been idiocy not to give the soloist his moment to shine, as he certainly did.) 

Once the ballroom had been brought to eyes and ears, the ‘Scène aux champs’ unfolded with every bit as keen a sense of musical narration. Excellent use was made of the Albert Hall; in veritable coups de théâtre, both oboe echo of cor anglais solo (excellent in both cases) and thunder-drums above in stereo with their siblings below made fine use of the gallery. Berlioz would have loved the spatial drama, as, I am sure, he would the Beethoven rarely more than a little below the surface, underpinning the movement’s structure. The darker timbres of the ‘March to the Scaffold’ echoed and extended the aforementioned corners in the first movement, lugubrious and extravert twin sides to the same fateful coin. If ever you had wanted to experience the sound of eight bassoons standing from within an orchestra, here was your opportunity. That was not in itself the point, but rather what was done with them—which proved to be of equal excellence.

A duly rollicking finale combined narrative and musical coherence to the extent that it would have been inconceivable to divide them. As black sabbath bells pealed from the gallery, witches and skeletons came to life and partied below. Coordination was no mean task in itself; bar one slightly precarious moment, quickly salvaged, there was no problem at all. The chase to the close, full of incident, imparted a properly Gothic thrill in this monstrous hall. If it were no surprise to be treated to an encore, the choice of music perhaps was: a darkly sensual John Barry ‘Space March’ from the score to You Only Live Twice. Now that is how you do film music.

Clayton/Britten Sinfonia/Adès - Beethoven and Barry, 23 May 2018

Milton Court

Beethoven: Six Ecossaises, WoO 83

An die ferne Geliebte, op.98

In questa tomba obscura, WoO 133

Gerald Barry: Jabberwocky

Beethoven: Quintet in E-flat major, op.16

Allan Clayton (tenor)

Alex Wide (horn)

Timothy Rundle (oboe)

Joy Farrall (clarinet)

Sarah Burnett (bassoon)

Thomas Adès (piano)

As a whole, this concert proved a curious affair. It probably made more sense in the context of Thomas Adès’s series of Beethoven and Barry concerts with the Britten Sinfonia. The idea of a night off from the symphonic Beethoven to turn to chamber works was, in principle, a good one, but the sole Gerald Barry piece here seemed oddly out of place – and not in a productive, provocative way. Even the Beethoven pieces did not really seem to fit together especially well. A lovely performance of the op.16 Quintet nevertheless made the evening worthwhile.

The first half, however, put one in mind of that proverbial, clichéd curate’s egg. Adès walked onto the stage and apologetically informed us that two works had been added to the programme. Nothing wrong with that, although Beethoven hardly requires apology. The first was his Six Ecossaises, WoO 83, which many of us will recall from childhood piano lessons. Adès’s performance proved a curious mixture of the reticent – as though he would rather be playing the dances at home – and the heavy-handed. It became more flexible, to good effect, as it went on. Ultimately, though, little was made of these charming miniatures, whether individually or as a whole.

An die ferne Geliebte followed, Adès continuing to show a good deal of reticence, for most of the time very much the ‘accompanist’. Allan Clayton offered a sincere, verbally attentive performance until the final song, in which he sounded curiously harsh of tone, even hectoring. Still, there was a good deal to savour, for instance a true hint of sadness at the close of the fifth stanza of ‘Es kehret der Maien’. Adès seemed to come into his own as the cycle progressed. If he still came across as shadowing the singer at the beginning of ‘Leichte Segler in den Höhen’, his shaping of a minor-mode phrase at the end of the third stanza – ‘Klagt ihr, Vöglein, meine Qual’, offered just the sort of touching insight I had hoped he would bring to the music of a composer with whom he is not so obviously associated. The transition to the next song, ‘Diese Wolken in den Höhen’ was also skilfully handled.

The second additional work was In questa tomba oscura, WoO 133, Beethoven’s setting of a poem by Giuseppe Carpani, amongst other things an early biographer of Haydn (and royalist spy!) This proved a duly haunting performance of a song whose text has a man visit the grave of his beloved, albeit from the standpoint of the latter, who reproaches her lover for not having thought more of her whilst she was alive. Perhaps again Adès might have brought out the piano part more strongly. Beethoven’s harmonies nevertheless told – and there is much to be said for understatement. Clayton clearly relished its challenges, heightening without overstating its curious drama.

‘Curious’ is certainly a word to be applied to Lewis Carroll, and to Gerald Barry, let alone to their combination in Jabberwocky, commissioned and premiered by Britten Sinfonia in 2012. The idea of performing its nonsense words in French and German translation is typically brilliant – and makes just as much (non)sense as the original. Clayton’s declamatory performance perhaps inevitably put one in mind of Barry’s brilliant operatic comedy, The Importance of Being Earnest. Alex Wide’s bizarre horn flourishes added another level to the studiously inexplicable entertainment unfolded. The song – should one call it a ‘song’? – seemed, almost in spite of itself, to grow, even to develop. And then it was over.

Additional wind players joined the ensemble after the interval for Beethoven’s Quintet for piano and wind instruments, op.16. It was the sheer gorgeousness of their sonorities that struck me first – and Beethoven at his most Mozartian (or, his tragedy, post-Mozartian). Balance with the piano here sounded much improved; there was greater impetus to the performance too. This is music that needs plenty of space, a grandeur of scale if you will, as well as chamber intimacy; it received both. The second movement was again well paced, its post-Mozartian sadnesses again given space to breathe, yet also to progress. Here, Adès could prove a little indulgent, his solo rubati occasionally puzzling; in concert, however, everything delighted. The hunting finale again summoned up Mozart’s ghost – as opposed to Haydn’s ebullience. Yet, quite rightly, not all was subtlety, not all was interiority. That balance and others were finely judged, in a performance of almost tiggerish enthusiasm.

Salzburg Festival (1) - Adès, The Exterminating Angel, 5 August 2016




Images: Salzburger Festspiele/Monika Rittershaus
Francisco (Iestyn Davies), Silvia (Sally Matthews), Leticia (Audrey Luna),
Leonora (Anne Sofie von Otter), Doctor (John Tomlinson)

Haus für Mozart

Lucía de Nobile – Amanda Echalaz

Leticia Maynar – Audrey Luna
Leonora Palma – Anne Sofie von Otter
Silvia de Ávila – Sally Matthews
Bianca Delgado – Christine Rice
Beatriz – Sophie Bevan
Edmundo de Nobile – Charles Workman
Raúl Yebenes – Frédéric Antoun
Colonel Álvaro Gómez – David Adam Moore
Francisco de Ávila – Iestyn Davies
Eduardo – Ed Lyon
Señor Russell – Sten Byriel
Alberto Roc – Thomas Allen
Doctor Carlos Conde – John Tomlinson
Julio – Morgan Moody
Lucas – John Irvin
Enrique – Franz Gürtelschmied
Pablo – Rafael Fingerlos
Meni – Frances Pappas
Camila – Anna Maria Dur
Padre Sansón – Cheyne Davidson
Yoli – Leonard Radauer
Servants – Maria Hegele, Silke Redhammer, Harald Wurmsdobler, Jakov Pejcic
Dancers – Uli Kirsch, Sophia Preidel, Stine Rønne, Pim Veulings, Eva Svaneblom

Tom Cairns (director)

Hildegard Bechtler (designs)
Jon Clark (lighting)
Tal Yarden (video)
Amir Hosseinpour (choreography)
Christian Arseni (dramaturgy)

 

Coming relatively late in the run to Thomas Adès’s new opera, The Exterminating Angel, I was unable to insulate myself entirely from what others had thought about it. I found people whose judgements I respect both fulsome in praise and in negative criticism. Seeing it here in Salzburg, I found myself in the somewhat unaccustomed situation of the juste milieu; I certainly did not find it a terrible work, far from it, but nor did I hear – or indeed see – anything in it that suggested it might hold the key to the operatic future. I was happy to have seen it, and should happily see it again, in order to see whether my mind would change; however, I cannot imagine travelling to do so. In what follows, I shall try to explain why, as well as paying tribute to the excellent performances from all concerned; I have little doubt that the opera received as fine a baptism as anyone could reasonably have hoped for.

Above all, I cannot answer the question ‘why an opera?’ To my shame, I had not seen Buñuel’s film before, but seeing the opera has sent me back to watch it. Even from a single viewing, it seems fully to merit its hallowed status. It is far less clear to me that it merits the transformation into an opera. In a sense, the answer to my question is simply, ‘because its creators wanted it to be’. It seems to me, though, that a great deal is lost and the work that emerges is, in some respects, not entirely free of sprawling self-indulgence. The cast is huge: in this case, a line-up of many of Covent Garden’s finest regular singers. (The production will move to London next year.) If one is going to transform a film into an opera, is it perhaps not better to offer more radical surgery? The stilted quality, even the superficiality, of high bourgeois conversation is clearly part of the point: as Bunuel, quoted in dramaturge, Christian Arseni’s admirable programme note, put it, ‘It wouldn’t be the same if I had used working-class characters, because they would have found a solution to their incarceration. … Because workers are more in touch with life’s difficulties.’ I cannot say that I found that critical element come to the fore here, though; is there perhaps too much all-purpose irony? I certainly would not go so far as to say that operatic characters need to elicit sympathy, but often it helps. Here, it is the Doctor – played in typically barnstorming fashion by John Tomlinson – who offers a voice of reflection, of reason; the problem is that he often seems in danger of being in a different opera altogether.

 

The first act, then, seemed pretty tedious to me in the theatre. The dramatic exposition does not lend itself especially well to musical treatment, although, as always with Adès, there are splendid vignettes: for instance, Blanca at the piano. (The request for her to play some Adès should really have been cut, though. Tom Cairns’s libretto – he also directs – is generally skilful indeed, but an in-joke should be funnier than that.) As the opera opens out, the composer’s exploration of situation and of relationship seems stronger, indeed more well-suited to conventional operatic writing. For, whatever this work is, it is not remotely experimental. Not that it need be, but it is far from clear to me that the operatic future, nor the better part of the operatic present, lies in neo-Verdian realism.

 

Parody is, unsurprisingly, a strong presence. I could not help but wonder whether the Johann Strauss waltzes – intriguingly, Adès, according to an enlightening interview with Cairns and Arseni, hears them as asking, ‘Why don’t you stay a little longer? Don’t worry about what’s going on outside’ – might have been a little less directly introduced. ‘When panic breaks out among the guests in Act Two,’ the composer continues, ‘I have layered motifs derived and distorted from various Strauss waltzes over one another in a Fugue of Panic, transforming them into a kind of whirlpool.’ To me, by contrast, it all sounded too obvious; elements sounded to me rather more than motifs and transformation did not seem to go very far. The explanation sounded more interesting than the musical reality, although the latter was certainly – like the dinner guests, or at least their conception of themselves – not without charm. The tolling bells with which the work starts and ends frame it well enough, although – presumably deliberately – they betoken a seriousness, an apocalyptic presence barely perceptible elsewhere. Adès’s employment of the ondes Martenot (yes, you guessed it: the excellent Cynthia Millar), apparently his first ever use of an electronic instrument, as the voice of the exterminating angel is clear enough, but it often just sounds a bit peculiar, even appliqué. Perhaps that is the point; nevertheless, I am not sure that the musical elements or indeed the musico-dramatic elements, insofar as they might be separated, really cohere. And yes, as you may have expected, we have a chaconne at the end.

 

Cairns’s productions looks wonderful in itself, Hildegard Bechtler’s set designs are imposing, her costume designs exquisite (as, dramatically, perhaps they should be). As with the work itself, I wondered whether something a little less straightforward might have helped one adopt more of a complex standpoint, both more distanced and more involved. But it does its job well enough, in terms that seem to be those of the opera itself. Adès’s conducting of the outstanding ORF SO sounded to me incisive and authoritative. To go through the cast, most of whom do not have very much to do, would not seem, at least on a first hearing, to do much more than repeat the cast list above. I mentioned Tomlinson earlier; others who stood out – and this may be as much a matter of their roles as anything else – were Amand Echalaz’s Lucía, Christine Rice’s Blanca, and Iestyn Davies’s Francisco, his vocal performance offering in its inflections a strong sense of the conflict in the character’s personality. Audrey Luna offered a trademark stratospheric performance, going far beyond Leticia’s role of the evening: Donizetti’s Lucia. Choral singing – there is not much of it – was excellent. Did the whole add up to more than the sum of its parts? Not really, although some of the parts were diverting enough.

Director Tom Cairns and Thomas Adès interviewed before tomorrow's world premiere of The Exterminating Angel

Photo: SF/Anne Zeuner

(Interview and synopsis below: courtesy of Salzburg Festival. I shall be reviewing the final performance in the run on 8 August. Following the 28 July premiere, there will also be performances on 1 and 5 August.)

Thomas Adès, when did you first encounter Buñuel’s film El ángel exterminador, and how long have you been playing with the idea of using it as the basis for an opera?

Thomas Adès: The idea goes back at least fifteen years, to a time before I began to compose The Tempest. I saw the film when I was thirteen or fourteen, when I think there was a Buñuel season on the BBC. My mother is a historian of art, especially Surrealist art, with Dalì and Buñuel particularly being part of her work, and so I encountered these things early on. I was strongly attracted to Buñuel’s films. Possibly at that age I didn’t like El ángel exterminador – shot in black and white and rather dry – as much as the more colourful, more ‘Pythonesque’ ones, like Le Charme discret de la bourgeoisie or Le Fantôme de la liberté (still probably my favourite), but the film stayed with me to the point of obsession. When these ideas to write an opera come to me, it’s not so much a conscious thing – the process is more like a seed that gets dispersed in the wind and either lands where it can grow or doesn’t; a sort of germination process.

But at some point you must have said to yourself: this film could make a good opera. Where does its potential for this lie? What makes it so suited to being translated into the medium of music or musical theatre?

Thomas Adès: In a way, El ángel exterminador is an operatic story in a very pure form, because every opera is about getting out of a particular situation. But in Buñuel’s film, whatever the mechanism is that gets us from A to B, it’s switched off: the guests know that they should go home – they have children who are waiting for them, things to do, etc. – but they don’t go. Even when they are starving and in despair, they’re incapable of doing so, although the doors are open. When you’re writing an opera, the composer’s job is to write music that gets you from moment A to moment B to moment C – as it were from one room into another room into another, eventually arriving at a destination. Every piece of music is looking for an exit, and the fun thing in this opera is that the characters are looking for an exit the whole time but keep coming back into the same room, though right at the end they do find it, at least temporarily.

The film is very musical in another way, too, because there’s an underground river of meaning which is not exactly what the people are saying. This river links the spoken lines and runs through the entire situation, but only occasionally surfaces. So the film has an unspoken subtext all the way through.

Tom Cairns: As is the case with all Buñuel’s later films, El ángel exterminador does not have a film score. The silences between the spoken lines, scenes and situations lend themselves perfectly for music. Silence is a wonderful thing, obviously, but music can perhaps convey this underground river even better.

Did your work on The Exterminating Angel begin with musical ideas – also as far as the overall structure of the work is concerned – or did you initially devote yourself solely to the libretto?

Thomas Adès: The first steps are always very mysterious. At first one is dealing with individual notes, or two notes. It’s rather like watching an embryo develop, the difference being that you might understand the DNA of this tiny cell later on and see how it relates to everything else. Rather the larger structure eventually develops from trying to link these cells together. My image of music as a natural process, as a living, growing organism, is a fairly precise analogy of an opera and the way in which it is created. It wouldn’t be truthful to start at the beginning by sketching this enormous shape, especially for a piece like this where the movements of this underground river are so complicated from line to line. Tom Cairns and I worked for years on the libretto, and it went through at least six different drafts before a note of music was written. You need to have a strong sense of the overall architecture in order to find the specific character of the music.

Tom Cairns: We’ve been working on the libretto since 2009. It was about deciding at the outset what the opera could be as an entity in itself. We agreed fairly quickly on what we could do to reshape the film and turn it into this particular art form. The libretto went back and forth several times, and in fact it ended up becoming much closer to the film than I’d imagined. In order to get the piece into a shape that was feasible on stage, we had to amalgamate a few characters – the seventeen guests of the Nobiles in the film become twelve in the opera. Since sung words take more time than spoken words, some of the text had to be reduced. Other original scenes were added.

Thomas Adès: Once I started writing the music, this in turn inevitably demanded numerous changes.

While you were working on the libretto, were you already considering where you would make use of the specific possibilities that musical theatre offers – particularly ensembles? For example, did you plan right from the beginning to make an ‘Enchanted’ ensemble out of the scene where the guests are being introduced to one another?

Thomas Adès: No, these decisions were taken as I was composing, for example, when I noticed that a line spoken by one person is actually a communal utterance. In the case of the guests being introduced to one another I suddenly saw an opportunity given by the Spanish word ‘encantado’: for an English-speaking person it is of course slightly odd to say ‘enchanted’, but thanks to its double meaning – ‘pleased to meet you’ and ‘spellbound’ – the word underlines that the figures are under a sort of spell and that the story has something of a fairytale.

Tom Cairns: Later, towards the end of Act Two, we refer to it again, when the Doctor passionately cries out: ‘We are not “enchanted”. This is not a magician’s house!’ He’s desperate to bring the mysterious situation under control and pull it back into his medical-rational approach to life. He is desperate at that point and in the most dreadful emotional state because he can’t control the situation. Scientific analysis is useless.

Thomas Adès, you have made various passages in the libretto into small solo scenes or mini-arias that show the figures – their character or emotions – in a different light from the film. During their captivity in the drawing room the guests are transformed from elegant, cultured people into something close to barbarians. While Buñuel depicts this process from a distanced, almost documentary perspective, it’s especially in these solo passages that you take us up close to the characters, sometimes in a very moving way. For example, we encounter the rather decadent Silvia de Ávila in Act Three cradling a sheep’s cadaver in her arms while she sings a ‘Berceuse macabre’, believing she is rocking her little son Yoli to sleep.

Thomas Adès: I think music demands these moments in opera – moments where things don’t proceed in ‘real time’, but where the action stops and the music comments on the emotional meaning of what is happening. In order to give some of the characters these static moments we’ve also made use of poems by Buñuel from the late 1920s, that is, from his very early, Surrealist phase.

Buñuel puts the people into a situation where their personalities as they are when they first encounter one another eventually break down or turn into something else. Buñuel plays with this façade. In the opera, the music supports the private personality behind the façade on the one hand (and lets us feel empathy with the characters), but on the other it also supports the other force which is pulling them into a kind of shared nothingness. Music can be powerfully levelling, because it tends to want to resolve everyone into the same place. The whole process is heightened in the opera. The music is a sort of destiny the characters are subject to. Sometimes it feels as if the music is responsible for keeping them in the room, and in the end it’s the music which releases them.

Often the music knows more than the people. When for example the guests arrive at the mansion and then – a physical impossibility – arrive again through the same door, we hear the same music but in altered form: it contains more sinister undertones, conveying a slight sense of things not happening quite at the right time or in the right order. When the guests have walked into the house the music occurs again in the orchestra, and this time you can sense that they are leaving reality behind, perhaps even that reality itself dissolves behind them.

Is the phenomenon of disintegration that the guests experience outwardly and inwardly reflected in your score?

Thomas Adès: When you think of something becoming a ruin or disintegrating, it is important that you can read its structure up to the last minute to a certain extent. The ‘double’ arrival of the guests and the dinner go by quite quickly, but in the rest of the opera I go over small moments of the music from these scenes and dig deeper and deeper into the musical material. Towards the end, when the guests are handing round scraps of meat around the burning cello, the music from the start reappears in a more complete form – Tom had the brilliant notion of letting the guests become a little like they were before and let them say things like ‘I prefer my meat à point.’

Tom Cairns: They’re suddenly at a dinner party, just like the old days – and ultimately they are reassuring themselves with this interaction…

Thomas Adès: …something I find very moving.

The music that you associate with the world of elegant social ritual, here and at the beginning of the opera, is the Viennese waltz, often coupled with lush chromatic harmonies.

Thomas Adès: What interests me about the waltz is the seductiveness of this music. I often feel that the waltzes by Johann Strauss are saying: ‘Why don’t you stay a little longer? Don’t worry about what’s going on outside.’ So in the context of our opera the waltz becomes very dangerous… When panic breaks out among the guests in Act Two, I have layered motifs derived and distorted from various Strauss waltzes over one another in a Fugue of Panic, transforming them into a kind of whirlpool.

Against that you have Leticia, whose music is mostly from another world. Her music takes over at the end and releases the guests from their strange captivity.

This takes us back to the irrational basic situation of the plot: the inability to leave the drawing room although there are no visible obstacles. In a brief text written by Buñuel to precede the film when El ángel exterminador was first shown in Paris he stated that ‘perhaps the best explanation’ for the film was that ‘rationally there is none’, but conceded that the film was open to multiple interpretations.

Tom Cairns: I’ve come to think very much like Buñuel, which I suppose is inevitable. I don’t feel the need to rationalize the situation. It feels almost normal to me that the guests can’t get out. I now don’t see it as irrational.

Thomas Adès: For me, the question is actually: Why can anyone ever leave a room?

Why is it Leticia who realizes how or rather that she and the others can leave the room?

Thomas Adès: The fact is that the servants, by some kind of instinct, know before everyone else that they have to leave the house. The host and some of the guests are aristocrats, but there are many hints that Leticia originates from a world closer to that of the staff – not least her higher sensitivity to what is happening to them.

Tom Cairns: Leticia is somehow aware of the situation long before the other guests. That’s possibly why she hurls the ashtray through the window in Act One – a first instinctive attempt to let air in from outside as she feels a strange atmosphere encroach on the room.

Thomas Adès: There is the idea that the humbler their origin, the more understanding a character will have of the power of the exterminating angel. This may be why Eduardo and his fiancée Beatriz – who don’t appear to be particularly privileged – choose to taken their own lives rather than become victims of the exterminating angel.

But who or what is the exterminating angel of the title? The film was originally going to be called something else and wasn’t renamed until during or after the shooting. Buñuel later said that he had sensed a ‘subterranean connection’ between the title El ángel exterminador and the content of his film.

Thomas Adès: In a way, the exterminating angel is an absence – an absence of will, of purpose, of action. Why do we ever do anything? The film poses this question in a very pure form, and the answer is: because otherwise we would be at the end, with death and extermination. You could say that extermination is what we’re fleeing from when we leave a room, when we do anything at all. In a way, the opera throws me back on how miraculous it is that we can and must act, indeed that we are alive at all. (In fact I find conducting it is surprisingly exhilarating – I’m starting to think of it as ‘The Exhilarating Angel’.) In this story the force that makes us act has been turned off, like a switch. The people no longer know why they should go home; they have forgotten what they are. The Doctor with his scientific, rational conception of the world tries in vain to control the phenomenon by giving it a pathological label – a Buñuel joke, diagnosing it as ‘aboulia’. On the one hand Buñuel conveys the impression that the force stopping the guests from leaving lies within themselves, but on the other, with this title, he takes the step of saying: let’s pretend that there is such a supernatural, destructive force, a mythical figure which makes it impossible to act. For me, once the exterminating angel has taken possession of the guests, the only possible outcome is the complete breakdown of society and the imposition of martial law – and ultimately the end of the world.

In the interlude after Act One you convey this dimension of the events in the drawing room in a very disturbing way. The music recalls the unsettling concluding sequence of Buñuel’s film, where demonstrators or revolutionaries are gunned down by the police.

Thomas Adès: Yes, it’s the first hint of that in the opera. Incidentally, Buñuel was obsessed by the drums of Calanda – his home town, where during Holy Week they would drum for three days and three nights – and I had thought for years about putting them in the opera, until I suddenly realized that the very judgemental interlude after Act One has the same rhythmic structure as the – unusually long – drumming rhythm in Calanda. So the drums naturally went in, which immediately brought the military quality I was looking for.

The exterminating angel also makes its presence felt in the opera with a very special sound…

Thomas Adès: It’s the first time I’ve ever used an electronic instrument in a piece: for me, the Ondes Martenot has the same relationship with the acoustic instruments of the orchestra as the exterminated world without life has with the world that does have life, without the exterminating angel. The Ondes Martenot becomes a symbol, the voice of this exterminating angel in the sense that the instrument is heard whenever a figure says something that contributes to the situation of immobility. Sometimes the Ondes Martenot almost forces things, for example, when the people outside are trying to make the little boy Yoli go into the house: the Ondes Martenot intervenes and it’s as though it frightens him into running away.

The Ondes Martenot has a beautiful, delicious sound. One has to bear in mind that although the exterminating angel is a terrifying, destructive force – an absence, a negative – it also possesses something very attractive and alluring. So the Ondes Martenot is like the sirens of Greek mythology, saying: ‘Stay!’

The bells with which the piece starts and which also sound at the end function as a sort of herald for the exterminating angel. You could say that bells are a kind of music which stays in the same moment all the time. Buñuel often used bells in his films, and especially here in Salzburg I’m struck increasingly by their extraordinary nature: they’ve been ringing for centuries, rang long before we were here and will ring long after we’ve gone. Bells are a form of eternity appearing in the river of time, an expression of the unchanging. They are saying: here is this moment again, and again, and again, and it is still the same, and so are you.

Let us return to the person who frees the guests from their state of paralysis: in the opera Leticia is given an even more central role than she has in the film. You’ve made her the prima donna of the opera performance the guests have been attending, whereas in Buñuel’s film the singer is a different figure, and after the dinner, in the drawing room, the guests plead with Leticia in vain to sing for them. Not until the end of the opera, when Leticia entreats the others to repeat their utterances and actions of the first evening, does she actually sing, and it’s as if her aria releases the guests from the room.

Thomas Adès: There is an idea that is present in the film but very easy to miss as it is not underlined by Buñuel – the character of Leticia, the ‘Valkyrie’, who almost never speaks, does not say ‘I want to go home’ at the crucial moment at the end of the first evening, as though she has forgotten her line; and it is almost as though this condemns them all to be trapped. I saw an opportunity to link this to the operatic soprano character whom we fused with Leticia, and have the missed line actually be a whole aria.

Where did you take the words for this aria from?

Thomas Adès: I have amplified a Jewish aspect here that is referred to only glancingly in the film – in an anti-Semitic line spoken by Raúl when the ashtray flies through the window (and which we have removed): ‘Some Jew passing by.’ The text of Leticia’s aria at the end of the opera is taken from an early twelfth-century Zionide of Yehuda Halevi, who wrote of his longing for Jerusalem in Spain. In the original it says ‘Zion, do you ask of my peace, who longs for yours?’, so I changed this to ‘My home, do you ask of my peace…’. Perhaps Leticia may have experienced this larger dimension of homesickness and exile. The return to Jerusalem is the ultimate image of returning. Buñuel also was very much an exile, which made him a figure of legendary power within Spain. There are also elements in Halevi’s text that link to the Surrealist imagery in El angel exterminador: the scattered sheep, the idea of eagles’ wings, the idea of ‘the chosen’.

There’s also a subtext of Jewish exile in the figure of Blanca, who is a musician as well, and like Leticia does not belong to the aristocracy. Her aria is based on the children’s poem ‘Over the Sea’ by Chaim Bialik, the father of modern Hebrew literature, with a very similar subject to Halevi’s Zionide. And the variations that Blanca performs on the piano in Act One are of course not really by Paradisi but my own variations on the Ladino song ‘Lavaba la blanca niña’, which has an unassuageable harmonic structure very typical of Jewish music of longing and bereavement.

And Leonora, with her obsession with the Kabbalah, completes our trio of ‘witches’.

Long stretches of the music of Act Three have an obsessive and dissonant, if you like irrational, quality. Leticia’s aria comes as a release, also in musical terms. It’s striking that it contains not a single half-tone or tritone, intervals that have occurred very frequently up to this point.

Thomas Adès: Actually, there are no dissonances in Leticia’s aria at all, at least not if you look at it from the perspective of a time so far back that it’s long before the rules of our traditional harmonics were established. I wanted this aria to have something of the quality of music from the twelfth or thirteenth century, because it can sound as strange to us as music that is very dissonant.

Music has a tendency to arrange itself either in terms of patterns or cycles. On a tiny scale, in a single bar, as well as on the huge scale of an entire opera there is always the possibility to decide not to be part of a pattern. This is part of my musical make-up, and I think it’s very much part of the action in The Exterminating Angel. We have figures trapped within cycles of thought and others who, like Leticia, fight against the cycles and patterns. To arrive at a real musical resolution, the patterns and cycles have to be subdued, recombined by the composer’s hand to produce a new doorway, if you like. And that’s exactly what Leticia does at the end, but of course then her aria just becomes another dominant waiting for resolution… (laughs)

At the end of the opera, the bells – which you described as staying in the same moment all the time – ring, here in combination with a repetitive musical form that constantly returns to the beginning, one which you’ve used several times in your works: the chaconne. To a line from the text of the Requiem the chorus repeatedly sings the same seven bars that it has already sung in the large ensemble before Leticia effects their release – the scene in which the guests take the decision to kill Nobile, their host, as a sacrifice, and which has a lot in common with the ‘delirious’ second dream sequence in the film.

Thomas Adès: Obviously, depending on how it’s written, a chaconne can have the quality of constantly not going through a door. When the chorus begins to sing that line from the Requiem off-stage, I want to convey the feeling that it’s been singing it forever and that it will go on forever after. That’s why this music returns at the end of the opera in a heightened form. With this chaconne – as opposed to the chaconne in The Tempest – my idea was that it never ends; that it just goes round in a spiral, down and down. My opera starts without a clear beginning – the bells one hears could just be the bells from outside (especially here in Salzburg) following one into the auditorium – and it has no real end. The score does not end with a double bar.

Buñuel’s film also has an open ending; it’s in the nature of the story. The final scene of the opera, however, differs from the film in several respects.

Tom Cairns: The final scene of the film takes place in the cathedral. The idea is that the guests have returned to the bourgeois or aristocratic world they had left – they’re back in their elegant clothes, they’re duly humbled, and of course they have to give thanks for their release – and then everything starts again from the beginning. For me, personally, this repetition is the least important part of the end. It’s the bigger issue that really matters: that there is no escape. We felt that this could be delivered within the context of our piece just as well without relocating the last scene, perhaps even more effectively. Ultimately we – that is, the audience in an opera house – are not that far removed from the people we’re watching on stage in The Exterminating Angel, very close in some cases; so why not ‘release’ the guests straight into the theatre, into the auditorium? At that moment they become other characters in a wider dramatis personae which now includes the members of the audience.

Thomas Adès: The feeling that the door is open but we don’t go through it is with us all the time.

Interview by Christian Arseni

THE EXTERMINATING ANGEL THE PLOT

Act One

At the mansion of Edmundo and Lucía de Nobile guests are expected for dinner, but strange things are happening. The butler, Julio, fails to stop Lucas the footman from running away, and the maids Meni and Camilla also attempt to leave. The Nobiles arrive after attending a performance at the opera. Among their guests are the evening’s prima donna, Leticia Maynar, and the conductor, Alberto Roc, with his wife Blanca, a famous pianist. Meni and Camila finally escape along with some other servants when the guests go into the dining room.

At dinner, Nobile toasts Leticia, whom brother and sister Silvia and Francisco de Ávila jokingly call ‘the Valkyrie’. Lucía announces a first course of Maltese Ragout, which the waiter spills spectacularly on the floor. Not everyone finds this funny, least of all the elderly Señor Russell. Lucía decides to postpone her other ‘entertainments’, and a performing bear and a number of lambs are removed to the garden. The rest of the servants flee the house despite Lucía’s protestations. Only Julio remains behind.

In the drawing room Blanca performs a piece on the piano. A young engaged couple, Eduardo and Beatriz, dance, and Leonora flirts with her physician, Doctor Conde. When he declines to dance, she kisses him instead. The Doctor confides in Raúl Yebenes that Leonora is gravely ill and does not have long to live. Blanca’s performance ends to general acclaim and compliments. The guests encourage Leticia to sing, but Señor Roc protests that she has performed enough for the evening.

A number of guests prepare to depart, while Roc falls asleep. In the cloakroom Lucía gives her secret lover, Colonel Álvaro Gómez, a fleeting kiss. The guests become lethargic and distracted – although it is now very late, none of them attempt to leave. Nobile is confused but behaves graciously, offering beds to anyone who wishes to stay. Señor Russell and the Colonel are horrified as some guests remove their tailcoats, but eventually they lie down like everyone else to sleep either on sofas or the floor. Eduardo and Beatriz retreat to a private corner to spend their first night together.

Act Two

The guests wake the following morning. Silvia announces that she slept very badly. The Doctor examines Russell: the old man is dying. Julio is supposed to prepare breakfast but reports that no supplies have arrived at the house. When Lucía tries to take some of the ladies to her bedroom to freshen up, they do not make it past the threshold of the dining room. Blanca is worried about her children, but even she and her husband are unable to make the decision to leave. Silvia finds the unusual situation amusing, particularly as she knows her son is in good hands with his private tutor, Padre Sansón. A further attempt by the guests to leave fails when Julio approaches with coffee and the leftovers from the previous evening’s dinner. Leticia entreats the butler not to enter the drawing room, but in vain. Blanca is desperate, while Raúl sees no reason to over-dramatize the situation. Francisco complains he cannot possibly stir his coffee with a teaspoon. When sent to procure coffee spoons, Julio also seems to have become a prisoner in the drawing room.

Evening approaches. Russell’s condition has worsened: he has fallen into a coma and needs urgent medical attention. Panic spreads among the guests: there is nothing more to drink, the outside world seems to have forgotten about them – and why did the servants leave the mansion the night before for no obvious reason? The Doctor pleads for calm, although even he seems to be losing his composure. Raúl becomes aggressive and holds Nobile responsible for the situation. Francisco is at the end of his tether and resists all attempts at pacification. Russell suddenly and unexpectedly regains consciousness, expressing his relief that he will not live to experience the ‘extermination’. Beatriz is troubled by the thought of dying amidst all these people, rather than alone with Eduardo. Blanca, Silvia and Leticia share a strange experience in the walk-in cabinet, which has been repurposed as a toilet.

During the night Russell dies. The Doctor and the Colonel haul his corpse into the cabinet, witnessed by Eduardo and Beatriz.

Act Three

Police guarding the mansion drive back a crowd of people who try to come to the aid of those imprisoned inside. Although some people break through the police ranks, nobody is able to enter the house.

In the drawing room Julio and Raúl burst a water pipe and the guests rush desperately to quench their thirst. Tormented with hunger, everyone’s behaviour becomes increasingly irrational. Blanca combs only one side of her hair, driving Francisco to hysterical desperation. When Francisco is unable to find the pills for his stomach ulcer, he immediately presumes that someone has hidden the box. Raúl goads Francisco about his relationship with his sister and triggers a volley of insults between the two men. Nobile tries to keep the peace, but this merely earns him recriminations. Leonora, who is in great pain, expresses her longing for the assistance of the Doctor and the Virgin Mary. Francisco is nauseated by Blanca’s smell and once again loses his nerves.

In her delirium Leonora sees a disembodied hand wandering around the drawing room. Trying to stop it, she stabs Blanca’s hand with a dagger. In the walk-in cabinet, Eduardo and Beatriz decide to die together. Señor Roc appears to molest Leticia, but Raúl accuses the Colonel instead. Nobile is injured during the ensuing scuffle. The lambs from the garden wander into the drawing room and the roaring of the bear terrifies the guests.

The army has quarantined the mansion. Padre Sansón appears with Silvia’s son, Yoli, and the people demand that the boy be sent inside. Despite encouragement from the crowd, Yoli is unable to get into the house.

The guests have slaughtered the lambs and cook them on a makeshift fire. Leonora recalls a premonition she had on the evening of the opera performance and attempts a magic ritual with Blanca and Leticia. It fails and she claims that innocent blood is needed. The bodies of Eduardo and Beatriz are discovered in the walk-in cabinet. During the course of yet another quarrel, Raúl hurls Francisco’s box of pills over the threshold of the drawing room. Silvia no longer takes any interest; cradling the cadaver of one of the lambs in her arms, she thinks she is rocking Yoli to sleep.

The bear appears across the threshold. Gradually the idea takes hold among the guests that a sacrifice is needed to secure their liberation: Nobile must be killed. The Doctor and the Colonel try in vain to make the others reconsider. Nobile declares that he will sacrifice himself of his own free will, but Leticia interrupts him. She says she has realized that at this moment each one of them is in exactly the same place as when their strange captivity began. With her encouragement the others hesitantly repeat the actions and dialogues from that moment. When Leticia is then asked to sing once again, this time she actually does so. Together they approach the threshold – and they are able to cross it. The guests and the crowd outside the mansion encounter one another. Their freedom will not last long.

Hadelich/Tonkünstler-Orch./Yamada - Haydn, Adès, and Mendelssohn, 24 November 2015

Musikverein, Vienna

Haydn – Violin Concerto in C major, Hob.VIIa/1

Thomas Adès – Concentric Paths
Mendelssohn – Symphony no.3 in A minor, 'Scottish', op.56

Augustin Hadelich (violin)
Tonkünstler-Orchester Niederösterreich
Kazuki Yamada (conductor)

This was, as ‘they’ say, a concert of two halves: two violin concertos in the first, in truly excellent performances by Augustin Hadelich; a symphony in the second, let down by uncomprehending conducting by Kazuki Yamada. Unifying the two halves was the splendid, dark-hued, ‘old German’ playing of the Lower Austrian Tonkünstler Orchestra. It had been far too long since I had heard them – three years ago, in fact, in a wonderful Mahler Second – but it was a delight to hear them once again, aided of course by the fabled warmth of the Musikverein acoustic.

 

Let me get the Mendelssohn out of the way: a real pity, given the depth of bass tone we heard from the orchestra. The first movement benefited from a beautifully grave opening, which really seemed to be leading somewhere. Alas, there was far less of a sense to that in the ensuing Allegro poco agitato, which, under Yamada, progressed only sectionally, with little impression of an overarching line, let alone of the dynamism inherent in Mendelssohn’s form. The scherzo is marked Vivace non troppo; not only did Yamada disregard ‘non troppo’ but he substituted Presto. His podium dancing was eye-catching, if unfortunate. The great Adagio, beautifully dark in orchestral colour, again proceeded fitfully, bar by bar. Gravity came through by virtue of the playing, but the conductor needed to make the music sound more at ease with itself. A hard-driven finale made me long to hear the same orchestra play the symphony with another conductor.

 

In retrospect, it became even more clear that the Haydn C major Concerto had been the soloist’s interpretation. Cultivated playing from both Hadelich and the orchestra was a joy from beginning to end: such a delightful change from the world of ‘authenticke’ grotesquerie some curious souls claim to favour in Classical music. In the first movement, everything simply sounded ‘right’: the tempo, rhythm, phrasing, articulation, harmonic motion, and so forth. Hadelich’s double-stopping was despatched with just as much beauty as his more lyrical lines, likewise his cadenza. The slow movement breathed air similar to, although not quite identical to, Mozart’s Salzburg. Lovely orchestral pizzicato heightened the resemblance: delightful! The finale was lively without that wearying need some soloists show to scream ‘high octane’. Most important, it was true to the work’s – and the performance’s – character; it acted as a finale.

I have often felt ambivalent about Thomas Ades’s music, but gained a much stronger impression from this work for violin and concerto, Concentric Paths. Although in the ‘traditional’ three movements, there was nothing Classical about their respective weighting, the second, ‘Paths’, clearly the weightiest as well as the longest. The striking, circling (?) opening put me in mind of a composer wanting – fair enough – to have his quasi-minimalist or indeed his quasi-modernist cake and eat it. As the concerns of this first movement, ‘Rings’, came more clearly into focus, I was often put in mind, not unpleasingly, of Prokofiev. Hadelich’s cleanness of tone was just as striking, however high-lying his part – and sometimes it is very high indeed. Frustrated and sometimes non-frustrated lyricism were often apparent, the intensity of dialogue between the soloist and other soloists from within the orchestra – taking up figures from each other, developing them – a particular joy. Shards, gestures, fragments and more of melodies: the second movement opened as if one were hearing only part of a greater whole, which again seemed to come into focus, and with a particularly strong sense of drama. The tuba, perhaps inevitably, put me in mind of Fafner – but Fafner with a sense of decidedly non-Wagnerian irony. Again, Prokofiev did not seem so very far away at times. Disjuncture of meter offer a decidedly irregular – in more than one sense – basis and/or topping to the third movement, ‘Rounds’. A Prokofiev-like combination of lyricism and the mechanistic is engendered with decidedly more (post-)modernistic means – and that, too, was how it sounded in performance.

The Tempest, Met Opera Live, 10 November 2012

Metropolitan Opera, New York, viewed at Cineworld, West India Quay

Ariel – Audrey Luna

Miranda – Isabel Leonard
Trinculo – Iestyn Davies
Ferdinand – Alek Shrader
Caliban – Alan Oke
King of Naples – William Burden
Antonio – Toby Spence
Prospero – Simon Keenlyside
Stefano – Kevin Burdette
Gonzalo – John Del Carlo
Robert Lepage (director)

Jasmine Catudal (set designs)

Kym Barrett (costumes)
Michel Beaulieu (lighting)
David Leclerc (video)

Metropolitan Opera Chorus

Metropolitan Opera Orchestra
Thomas Adès (conductor)

 

‘Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.’ That was how I began my review of the Met broadcast of Robert Lepage’s production of Götterdammerung. I feared that it would do again for The Tempest, yet, although this was no triumph, save for some of the singers and indeed the splendid Met orchestra, nor, at least on the big screen, did it prove the excruciating embarrassment I had feared, largely due to excellent performances. I wonder how much of the rest of the salvage was due to clever filming, given that the voices of those in the theatre earlier on during the run, voices I respect, seem to have been united.

Let there be no misunderstanding: Lepage’s production was mindless in the extreme. No change there. The half-hearted attempt at meta-theatricality – are we not all tired of that now, unless it be the work of someone who really engages with the work as well – was one of the worst I have seen. All it seemed to involve was setting the opera at La Scala, for no other reason than that Prospero was once Duke of Milan, and then leaving a confused nonsense to play itself out, sometimes in front of the Scala theatre and some (eighteenth-century?!) spectators, sometimes not. Prospero, Ariel, and still more Caliban looked as if they were refugees from one of Lepage’s Cirque du Soleil shows. At one point there is an apparently non-ironic – though maybe I am just too stupid to plumb its deaths – of a filmed couple (Miranda Ferdinand) walking off into the sunset. There really is nothing more I can think of to say about the production, so I shall leave it there. 

Let there be no further misunderstanding: Adès’s stature remains inflated far beyond his talent. Still, that is not his fault; nobody forces others to stage his works, even though there may be a host of better claimants – or at least I assume no one does. The greater part of the first two acts was undistinguished in the extreme, rarely if ever rising above the level of a typical soundtrack for a middlebrow television serial. There is certainly nothing to frighten away even the most timid of horses, though I suspect that even equine or indeed bovine audience members might wonder what the point in such an enterprise might be. There is often a certain skill with orchestration, but then any decent postgraduate composition student ought to be able to manage that. Otherwise, harmonies are resolutely unchallenging – Britten sounds adventurous by comparison – and direction is unclear. O for a touch of Birtwistle! The third act picks up considerably. Whilst no masterpiece, there is greater dramatic focus, more of a sense of responding to the story, and the passacaglia towards the end, if obvious beyond the call of duty, does its business. Ariel must be one of the most irritating characters – if one can call her that – in the operatic repertoire, but at least that her insanely vertiginous coloratura adds a dash of interest. The shades of Couperin work better in context than when taken as a suite, but perhaps that is because the dullness of the score as a whole sets them in positive relief.

As for Meredith Oakes’s ghastly libretto, let there be no additional misunderstanding.  I cannot bring myself to recall, let alone to repeat, its doggerel. Not wishing to set Shakespeare ‘straight’ is perfectly understandable, but the only relief in this banal effort is the unintentionally comic. (Again, I cannot recall a particular instance, so the humour remains a relative concept.)

The Met Orchestra played splendidly for Adès, who, like Britten, except at a far lower level, consistently seems a more impressive performer than composer. (The moment we have a Turn of the Screw it will be worth a change of heart, but I am not sure we have yet heard the equivalent of the Britten Piano Concerto yet.) Incisive, full of tone, splendidly colourful: it is difficult to imagine a better performance than this. If only the orchestra’s talents had been lavished on a more worthy contemporary score. The Mask of Orpheus, perhaps? The chorus sang and acted well too. Moreover, there was a good deal of fine singing, most crucial of all Simon Keenlyside’s Prospero, whose performance at times came as close as humanly possible to moving, given the material. Audrey Luna’s Ariel was apparently effortlessly despatched, a splendid achievement. Alan Oke was creepily ‘different’ and yet unfailingly musical as Caliban, though something a little more threatening might have been in order. (Perhaps that was a matter of stage direction though.) Isabel Leonard and Alek Shrader were as beautiful and handsome of voice as of aspect, the latter especially touching in his sadness and his joy. Toby Spence and Iestyn Davies were as impressive as one would expect, Davies almost managing to convince one that his was a genuine Shakespearean – or Monteverdian – character. If only...

Maybe I set the bar too low, but this was better than Götterdämmerung. However, I beseech you not to take that claim out of context.

 

Samantha Brick: The Opera?

Let it never be said that I fail to keep my finger on the pulse of popular culture, if at times a little tardily. Many readers will have heard about the extraordinary, not to say beautiful, Ms Brick some time before I did; indeed, I am still not at all sure who she is, or what she does, aside from having written a now renowned article in the Daily Mail. (This will, I trust be the one and only time I provide a link to that particular website.) Is there not, however, something wonderfully operatic about this woman's delusions, her grasping towards and her sudden attainment of that greatest of modern idols, celebrity? Does she not present a weird, if undeniably down-market, cross between the Woman in Schoenberg's Erwartung and the telephone obsessive in Poulenc's (and Cocteau's) La Voix humaine? So, is it to be a monodrama, or something more along the lines of Powder Her Face (roles at the very least for the stewardess and the pilot), or Anna Nicole even? A chorus of Daily Mail readers would make horrifyingly good musical drama, perhaps thereby offering a nod to Moses und Aron? Samantha in Sprechstimme, a Golden Calf of celebrity around which Mail readers eagerly shed their suburban inhibitions? Perhaps even a male Samantha, underlining the Mosaic precdent further? Bookmakers are presently declining to offer odds against a Linbury Theatre outing in 2013. Suggestions for composer, librettist, and vocalist(s) are most welcome...











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