Of all the operatic ventures that have sprung up in England in the past 20 years, Birmingham Opera Company may well be the most remarkable. Its artistic director is Graham Vick, who is well acquainted with opera at its most elitist — he was artistic director of Glyndebourne from 1994 to 2000. BOC is at the other extreme, in that productions now regularly take place in a disused steel foundry on the outskirts of the centre of Birmingham, and the aim is to involve as many local inhabitants as possible. Over the past few years there have been impressive performances of Verdi’s Otello (it was televised, and survived the scrutiny extremely well), Idomeneo and, most movingly to me, Ulysses Comes Home, a wonderful version of Monteverdi’s greatest opera.
This year, however, BOC is breaking new ground. Not only has it scored a coup in putting on the world première of Stockhausen’s Mittwoch aus Licht (Wednesday from Light), which will be given four performances in August (it lasts six hours); but it has just staged the première of Jonathan Dove’s new opera Life is a Dream, adapted by Alasdair Middleton from the play by Calderón.
Whatever I write in critique of the work or the enterprise, it is still an outstanding achievement, though perhaps not primarily an artistic one. Having located the theatre — visitors would be well advised to go by taxi — one passes through the entrance area into a large tent-like room, where, not to my pleasure, a PE instructor who would have been more at home at Butlins in the 1950s tried to put us through our paces. Then through a narrow passage to the vast barn-like space where the opera is performed. There is no indication, at first, as to where the action will be, but stewards urge people in various directions, and depending on where you are sent you witness a funeral procession, a wedding party, a family Christmas, a birth.
The orchestra is in the centre, circularly walled in: an expert body of professionals (I take it) with the unflappable William Lacey in command. Many locals are on the move among the audience, some with pillows on their head, wearing pyjamas or a good deal less; some straining behind glass; some shouting. A woman starts singing from a high balcony, and breaks a window, while a bride and bridegroom prepare themselves elsewhere, and an imprisoned young man protests, movingly, that he is not a beast.
Lots of things happen all the time, so that wherever you are standing in the vast space something, though not necessarily the most important thing, is going on near you. The singers are a magnificent team, and enunciate with the maximum possible clarity. It isn’t their fault if they are defeated by the immense distances and the resonant acoustic of the building. The main trouble is that it is very difficult to know what is going on — which might confirm people’s prejudices about opera in general. The programme offers only a couple of cryptic sentences. So it’s a bit like being in an operatic supermarket, where you take your pick of the various simultaneous events.
I had taken the precaution of reading the play on which it is based the evening before, but that could have been more of a hindrance than a help, since I kept trying to link the play and the opera, and failing almost always. Still, on its own terms it is a lively evening. Dove’s music is, as usual, highly eclectic, and in this case more than in the other operas of his I’ve been to it seems to be reaching out to the world of the musical. There are echoes, or more, of plenty of classical composers: at one point the tremendous Paul Nilon, who plays the King trying to ensure that his son doesn’t wreak havoc, as has been foretold, is accompanied by a beautiful passage closely related to Das Lied von der Erde, and there is some Britten, the choral singing is often Stravinskian, and the huge swelling climaxes pay tribute to the Korngold of the great movie scores. But Bernstein is more present than any of those, and the solo singing idiom in particular is in that fluent tradition. Besides Nilon, whose lovely tenor voice seems to be ageless, there are great performances from the intimidating Keel Watson, who made such a superb Iago for BOC; from Eric Greene, as Segismondo, the captive son who is treated like a beast and so often behaves like one; and from Joseph Guyton, as the bridegroom. It is virtually miraculous that the singers, solo and choral, kept such perfect time with the orchestra, and the whole effect is far more polished than one might expect. But, given that the peregrinatory nature of the production involves many more bit players than a single-staged effort would do, couldn’t we now have a show where we can be less restive, and above all where we can sit down?
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