A synopsis of Mark Simpson’s opera Pleasure – premiered in Leeds before the Royal Opera brought it to London last week for a short run – might not recommend it to an average reader of the Catholic Herald. Set inside the toilets of a gay bar, its four characters include a sharp-tongued drag queen, a despondent lavatory attendant and a sexually confused man who destroys himself with drugs and alcohol. It isn’t pretty. It’s not Madam Butterfly.
But then again, perhaps it is. Opera has never been the decorative art people assume. It deals with hurt and pain and dark truths (Butterfly, for all its tinsel packaging, is seriously dark). And Pleasure, though depressing, turns out to be touchingly humane and deeply moral: very much an opera for our times to the extent that it explores the underside of a fast-moving, fun-filled but unfeeling world whose glamour camouflages loss and loneliness.
Mark Simpson’s work has gathered much attention recently, with pieces like an oratorio, The Immortal, that explored the subject of the afterlife and dazzled critics at its premiere last year. He’s hugely gifted, the most promising of the still twenty-something generation of composers in Britain. And a lot was riding on this opera. Too much for its own good.
Musically it doesn’t quite live up to expectations: it feels over-cautious after the excess of The Immortal, too reserved, without a strong enough dramatic shape. But there’s an interesting ear for texture; an effective if self-consciously poetic text by Melanie Challenger; and memorable performances from ENO veterans Steven Paige, as the drag queen, and Lesley Garrett as the lavatory attendant – a role to which she brings disarming pathos and a brave degree of self-exposure. I was never wild about the pert, soubrettish roles that filled much of her long career. But this is something else. Truly impressive.
I’ve no deeply principled objections to the way the German composer Hans Zender rewrites other people’s music, and find his enlargement of Schubert’s Winterreise songs into a stagework with small orchestra – just done at the Barbican by Ian Bostridge – fascinatingly provocative.
Familiar words and melodies are relocated into unexpected, often haunting sound-worlds. And I almost like the way it turns into a Weimar cabaret experience, with the solo voice a sombre emcee – which is how the staging (Netia Jones with hi-tech video support) has Bostridge for a good deal of the time.
The test, though, of this kind of thing is whether it increases or dilutes the music’s natural power. And here it’s a dilution. Zender’s fanciful elaborations are no match for the intensity and focus of the simple forces Schubert wrote for.
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