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Henrietta Bredin

Wednesday, 26th March 2008

Henrietta Bredin talks to the Young Vic’s David Lan and ENO’s John Berry about the joys of collaboration

‘It’s great to get out and about, and I really do hope that we can find a genuinely different, more diverse audience.’ He fights the notion of operas being pigeonholed, of singers and players overspecialising in early or contemporary music. ‘When I was working in Paris a couple of years ago they were doing The Coronation of Poppea and someone showed me the cast list from the previous time it was done there, around 1978. The singers were Jon Vickers, Valerie Masterson, Christa Ludwig, big unequivocal opera voices. I loved that. In Punch and Judy we’ve got the most amazing cast — singers with incredible experience like Andrew Shore and Graham Clark alongside Gillian Keith, for example, just before she makes her Royal Opera debut as Zerbinetta in Ariadne auf Naxos.’

Gardner is intrigued to know what people will make of Lost Highway, in particular. ‘It’s a complete unknown for people here. Olga Neuwirth is a composer with a huge reputation in Austria and Germany, also in France, but she’s had very little exposure here. I think people will be interested because of the David Lynch film and I’m thrilled about the casting of David Moss, who sang Orlofsky in the really crazy production of Die Fledermaus at Salzburg a few years ago. People were throwing their programmes at the stage. It was absolutely brilliant.’ Moss is an extraordinary singer, who describes himself as an ‘extreme vocalist’, has written and directed his own shows and who delivered Orlofsky’s strange showpiece ‘Chacun à son goût’ sporting matted grey dreadlocks, a generous naked belly hanging over his waistband, in a range of falsetto yelps and bowel-churning growls.

‘The set-up for each show will be completely different,’ Gardner explains. ‘Lost Highway is an electro-acoustic score so that has its own particular demands, and with Punch and Judy I’m trying to work out how to make the music surround the audience as much as possible. It’s got to be an overwhelming and really powerful experience. Harrison Birtwistle may have written it 40 years ago but it hasn’t lost any of its impact. It’s still like being slapped around the face. Very hard. With the back of someone’s hand.’