Music
MusicalMusical low profile
Robin Holloway
he revived Almeida Festival, modest
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after the dotty, hit-or-miss prodigality of its earlier phase, now aims to concentrate upon small-scale opera, with a surrounding series of related concerts. But a mighty force smiles over it — the experimental wing of the English National Opera which means that its productions can be staffed and cast from strength.
Terrible Mouth, with text by Howard Barker and music by Nigel Osborne, was receiving its premiere. The subject is Goya in middle life, deaf and demented, con- fronting the atrocious realisation of his fleshly fantasies, both of sex (avid voyeurism) and of carnage (much cradling of a gruesomely lifelike severed leg). In modern times Goya has become for obvi- ous reasons both signal and pretext for nightmare extremity. The horrors he suf- fered in his person and expressed in his art are lightly borne by most of the aftercom- ers who so thrill to them. Thus it is here: the shudders are unearned either by the overkill of David Pountney's production with its gibbering loonies (`Chorus of the Maimed') out of Marat/Sade or by the lym- phatic score. Desire to harrow the soul and rub our noses in the stench is patent, but the music's power to achieve emotion is so limited that the weight inevitably falls upon the visual aspect. Their combined result causes for the most part puzzlement, dis- gust and boredom rather than purgation (the exception is the welcome and effective cool of the erotic scenes). Two ideas have good potential. The six distant cellos, intended perhaps to render the secret sounds within Goya's silent head, remained under-exploited. More vivid was the bond- ing between the unhinged painter with his obstreperous blurts of speech and the young, articulate alter ego able to give voice to his unabated consciousness. Both were well taken in a strong cast (conducted by David Parry) in which Richard Van Allen's 'Man without a Conscience' and Elisabeth Laurence's perfidious Alba were outstanding.
Stephen Oliver's Mario and the Magician, here receiving its British premiere, couldn't on the face of it be more different — fast- moving, suspense-filled, expert, without any delusions as to what it can't deliver. It shares more with Britten's Death in Venice than with another Thomas Mann story set in an Italian seaside resort; indeed it is a kind of variation and in some aspects an intensification. Britten's giving the core of his action to a dancer is here extended to embrace the entire production style, highly choreographic throughout though there is no ballet as such. A group of louche and knowing male adolescents replaces Brit- ten's prep-school beach games. And the Magician himself, Dr Cippola, is like all the facets of Aschenbach's malign double the fop, the surly gondolier, the obsequious hotelier, the ingratiating barber, the coarse and suggestive street musician — rolled into one. Richard Jackson played this sinis- ter yet pathetic manipulator with electrify- ing suavity, and the production as a whole (Tim Hopkins, conductor Nicholas Kok) was tight and compelling.
What links the two pieces under review is that music appears to be their least vital ingredient. The composers are quite differ- ent. Osborne remains fixed with the going modernistic effects of 25-odd years ago, but so thinly spread as to be virtually minimal- istic. Oliver is harder to characterise. Intri- cate, sometimes self-defeatingly unsimple (so one welcomed the respite given by pas- sages with piano alone), his music is always sufficient for the purpose, yet curiously fea- tureless — deceptively sharp at the edges, out of focus at the centre. But neither gave any memorable sonorous imagery to take holm.
This musical low profile, when the visual and dramatic aspects are so forceful, is worrisome. Perhaps in the early stages of an emerging genre the compositional sub- stance will inevitably be a bit thin — Mon- teverdi comes to mind. But music-theatre and chamber opera is not so new now. And it would not be good to think that the role of 'maximal music' — music exerting its full powers to paint the picture, pose the peo- ple, pace the plot, express the passions on the stage and also in the auditorium — will not be grist to this extremely accomplished enterprise. If music doesn't do these things, it becomes mere background; and if it is mere background, it might as well not be there at all.
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