Imagining the end of time is never a productive exercise but a temptation that attracts us all – including young composers like the noted Tom Coult, whose first ever opera premiered at last month’s Aldeburgh Festival and was an interesting essay in the Last Things, delicately balanced between whimsy, pantomime and nightmare warning.
Its title, Violet, gave nothing away beyond the name of a character who, though central to the plot, is more its servant than its mistress. She’s a strangely disaffected woman who perceives that time is literally running out, each day an hour shorter than the one before. While those around her see this, not unreasonably, as a crisis that will sweep them into an abyss of nothingness, she sees it as escape from a routine existence and sails out to sea – presumably in the belief that nothingness will be better there.
Whether it proves to be so, we’re not told: this parable about the world’s end brings no obvious promise of deliverance. Meanwhile the opera ends with a stylistic jolt into the almost unrelated tailpiece of a film with images of violence and banality. Perhaps they represent the aftermath of nothingness, perhaps they indicate why things have come to this: it isn’t clear, and you can’t help but feel that Coult and his librettist Alice Birch set out with no fixed plan for how their narrative would finish, then got stuck.
That said, Violet grasps a core truth about opera: that good narratives don’t tell you everything but leave space for the music to fill in, working a magic of its own. Coult’s score is magical from start to finish, written in a way that conjures up rich, vivid soundscapes with impressive skill. I can’t remember when I last heard a more striking first attempt at opera. And it had a good team in director Jude Christian, Anna Dennis singing the title role, and the London Sinfonietta conducted by Andrew Gourlay delivering fantastic work all round. But then at Aldeburgh, that’s what you expect.
Founded by Benjamin Britten who remains its presiding spirit, there’s no finer festival in Britain. And this year’s opening weekend set the tone for 2022, with the outstanding clarinettist/composer Mark Simpson in residence; Dame Janet Baker turning up to talk about her own life as the queen of English mezzos; and an exhibition about the women in Britten’s world – homing in on artists like the great Dame as well as the late soprano Jennifer Vyvyan which, as Vyvyan’s biographer, I was delighted to see. Her significance in creating major operatic roles for Britten and other composers gets forgotten these days, but it was important at the time. Worth celebrating now.
Someone of indisputable significance these days is the baritone Roderick Williams who turns up all over the place – not just as a singer but as a composer too. And it was in both capacities that he surfaced in the depths of rural Sussex for a concert in the Shipley Arts Festival that had him performing songs by John Ireland (who once lived nearby), and introducing the premiere of his own, newly completed Piano Trio. Written for the Stradivarius Trio, who played it here, it was a relative rarity for Williams who tends to write music for voices, setting a text. So it was perhaps an indication of straying beyond his com-fort zone that this wordless piano trio made reference in one movement to a folk song, and in another to John Ire-land’s famous hymn-tune for “My Song is Love Unknown” (which emerged blazing out of the abstract instrumental writing, half-disguised with jazz harmonies). The temptation to sing along was considerable in my corner of the audience which clearly contained church-goers. And though we didn’t, a point was made: embed a celebrated hymn-tune in a new work and you give your listeners an aural anchorage. Something to fix on. There’s a risk of tackiness, but done with confidence – as this was – it can be a winning move. And Williams’ trio won me over. All the way home, on a strike-afflicted train that nearly left me stranded, I took comfort in that tune (and no less in the clever things Williams did to it).
Stephen Sondheim was always insistent that he wrote musicals, not operas, but the stature of his work renders the difference meaningless; and the extent to which his shows are done these days by opera houses was acknowledged last month when the National Opera Studio (which trains young singers) staged a Sondheim gala – making the point that “classical” singers need to know this repertoire and learn how to project the words.
With Sondheim the words matter. Always. And this Sondheim gala, staging extracts from assorted shows, summed up the wisdom, principle and generosity of spirit in the words that underwrite his genius. Sondheim looks at humankind in all its muddled failings, and forgives; it’s what makes him one of the supremely great creative artists of our time. His death last year was a profound loss that we go on mourning.
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