Coliseum; Barbican, London
Harrison Birtwistle’s monumental early opera is revived in an epic tussle between myth, meaning, the lustrous and the lurid. Plus, a sensory feast with Steve Reich and Gerhard Richter
Answer, answer, answer. This refrain, both plea and command, concludes Harrison Birtwistle’s opera The Mask of Orpheus, a nearly four-hour epic of rampant and elusive complexity. Answers are hard to come by. It tells the story, in multiple versions simultaneously, of the musician god who tries to retrieve his dead wife, Eurydice, from Hades. Its only full staging was at the London Coliseum in 1986. Whatever you thought of the extravagant new production by English National Opera, conducted by Martyn Brabbins and directed by the company’s former artistic director, Daniel Kramer, it was a musical event with guts: composers were out in force on first night, a reminder that The Mask of Orpheus, landing on 20th-century music like a meteor, had no precedent or successor.
Riddles are key to every Birtwistle opera, from Punch and Judy (1968) to Gawain (1991) and The Minotaur (2008). They exist in the text – “Riddle me ree”, to borrow from Punch – and for the listener. None is easy to unravel. None has tunes to hum, if that’s your priority. In The Mask of Orpheus, which has an impossibly dense libretto by Peter Zinovieff, music, song, dance and mime are yoked into a massive, unwieldy entity. It needs a large, unconventional orchestra, dark with bassoons, trombones, tubas; luminous with electric guitar, mandolin, soprano saxophones. Two conductors have to marshal these forces. Brabbins was second in command on the 1997 NMC recording. Now he is, brilliantly, in charge, with James Henshaw as his sous conductor, assisted by Adam Hickox. Pioneering electronics (by the late Barry Anderson), based on the sounds of a harp, add sumptuous beauty.
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