Handelian pleasures vs modern head-scratchers

Opera seems almost always to have been acutely concerned with its own future. These days this is most often manifested in occasionally desperate, sometimes patronising attempts to entice new audiences to the art form. A new three-way initiative between Aldeburgh Music, the Royal Opera and Opera North takes a different tack by enabling a new generation of composers and librettists to try its hand in this most exacting art form.

The initiative’s first fruit was a double bill premièred in Aldeburgh before being shown at Covent Garden’s Linbury Studio Theatre and Leeds’s Howard Assembly Room. That these two short pieces, about 45 minutes long each, should feel like studies for larger canvasses was inevitable: their main purpose, one imagines, is to lead to bigger, better things. What they made clear, however, was that one perennial operatic problem remains: that of the libretto. Neither in this case seemed much concerned with narrative. Both were self-consciously enigmatic and literary: this can be effective, but it hardly encourages the sort of cumulative, direct emotional engagement that this art form does so well.

This was certainly the case with The Commission, composed by Elspeth Brooke to a libretto, derived from a Michael Donaghy poem, by Jack Underwood. In a manner reminiscent of George Benjamin’s Written on Skin, the characters were unnamed archetypes, here in an opaque plot of revenge: a Craftsman, a Silversmith and his Daughter, the Pope and Surgeon (both sung by a countertenor). We were told it carried all sorts of brooding ironies and significance, inspiring — depending on one’s constitution — either chin-stroking or head-scratching.

Brooke’s music showed enormous skill and a great deal of imagination, and she cleverly mixed the sonorities of a small ensemble (including cimbalom, mandolin and accordion) with recorded voices and sound effects, incorporating populist elements into a bracing but varied modernist idiom.