The difference between lovable, likable and admirable is perhaps more significant in the operatic world than in other artistic spheres — and is often, alas, translatable directly into all-important box-office receipts. The most ambitious production in English Touring Opera’s spring season provides an opportunity to see where Michael Tippett’s second opera, King Priam, fits on the spectrum. Premièred in Coventry in 1962, one day before Britten’s War Requiem, it’s rarely staged but often spoken of in tones of hushed awe; and it is undoubtedly a remarkable work: spare, concise, fierce and often irresistible in its conviction.
After the strange, sprawling, socks-and-sandals allegory of Tippett’s first opera The Midsummer Marriage, the composer’s second libretto, though still occasionally clunky and didactic, is relatively economical. It convincingly distils a chunk of the Iliad into three short acts, whose ten scenes are punctuated by Brechtian interludes. Out go the Greek gods; in comes cool, ineluctable fate, whose predetermined course the characters, in a state of knowing resignation, can do little to alter. The Midsummer Marriage’s musical radiance is replaced largely by austerity, with much stark brass writing and percussion. But the score, for all its integrity and undeniable moments of beauty, feels a little dated, grey and earnest, the drama uneven. It’s admirable, yes, but ultimately rather difficult to like, let alone love.
There’s plenty to admire in ETO’s endeavour, too, whose limited resources necessarily impose a further austerity on the piece — an austerity amplified in the bald discomfort of the Royal Opera House’s much-unloved Linbury Studio Theatre. (Experiences will be different as the production sets off on a tour that lasts until the end of May.) Little is lost in Iain Farringdon’s sensitive reduction of Tippett’s orchestration, and Michael Rosewell, here hidden with his players at the back of the stage, conducts with impressive authority.
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