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Colour and energy

Michael Tanner

Wednesday, 3rd September 2008

Love and Other Demons
Glyndebourne

When it comes to watching and listening to the piece, by far the strongest impression is made by a brief but intense love duet, with Father Cayetano Delaura, the Bishop’s librarian, hopelessly and of course sinfully in love with Sierva, who is moderately responsive. Their music surges and reaches a climax, something that the rest of the music could never be accused of. It helps that the performers of these roles are so striking: Nathan Gunn, the buffed baritone who is as impressive with his shirt off as Simon Keenlyside — but should a priest be working out so hard? — is also endowed with a warm and strong voice, and I look forward to seeing him in a worthy role. Allison Bell, a replacement for the singer for whom the role of Sierva was intended (we’re told that everything was written with these specific artists, and with this opera house, in mind), is transcendently impressive: easy to believe that she is a 12-year-old, though she sings the long and arduous role tirelessly, and acts with exhausting energy. They are electrifying, but no one is less than admirable, with Felicity Palmer’s Abbess a tower of oppressive authority.

With such strong performers, inhabiting high-profiled figures, you might expect some tense drama, but it never happens. Partly that is due to the libretto. It is compact and things move along, but the language is often strained, with ungrammatical constructions and passages of mere obscurity, not to mention being macaronic to a degree, while the surtitles only told us what we were hearing in English, so that our Yoruba, Latin and Spanish were taken for granted. But of course the source of the drama here as in all opera would be the music, and that is in short supply. I haven’t seen a copy of the score, but I imagine that it is on many lines, most of them blank almost all the time. The polyphonic effects of having the double winds, etc., placed antiphonally failed to register at all where I was sitting. What mainly did was the ceaseless tinkling of the celesta, an instrument which post-Boulezians are magnetised by. There are about three major, brief orchestral outbursts, otherwise the singing is skeletally supported. This may be because Eötvös decided to compose a bel canto opera, but for that you need more than scantily accompanied voices. What there are unwelcome quantities of are inordinately high passages of vocal squealing, such as I’ve tired of in The Handmaid’s Tale, The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, Ariel’s infuriating music in The Tempest. Why are contemporary composers so attracted to the stratosphere, and why do they hunt in packs?

As to the production by Silviu Purcalete, it is lucid, economical, seems to encourage each singer to forthright action, and leaves us in no doubt of what is happening, except when that is deliberately unclear. There are many fascinating projections, and whatever else, it makes for a short-ish, colourful evening.