Music
Almeida experiments
Robin Holloway
Ameida Opera has persisted down the years in that very unBritish thing, experi- mental music-theatre. But there is some- thing British in the incongruity of taking the radical out of its usual setting of bunker-cum-operating-theatre, into a cosy little ex-music hall with its manifestly inad- equate performance space and its tendency under pressure to turn into a black hole. When, as frequently, a work's visual aspect is undernourished, the eye has plenty to enjoy — the scattered distribution of black- clad musicians against black-clad walls, the flickering screens that co-ordinate them, the tangle of wires and lights — which all has the effect of involving the audience in the workings. There's just a hint of the vil- lage hall — admittedly the well-heeled arty villages of London N: Ham. and High., Camden, Islington itself. Standards, however, are unimpugnably professional. Nothing is stinted. All three operas this summer contain an electronic component, two require video screens requirements supplied unquestioningly. More important is the sense that every- thing is set up from strength. One is accompanied by the London Sinfonietta; the Almeida Ensemble, for the other two, is scarcely inferior; all three are masterfully conducted; acting and singing are top- notch; lighting, design, direction are of proven calibre.
So what is the problem?
Perhaps it lies in that word experimental (`Oh word of fear/unpleasing to an English ear'). Let me lay out apprehensions, predis- positions and eventual reactions with straightforward frankness.
Before a word has been read you are put on your guard by the programme cover, reproducing a van der Weyden lady's face, her mouth replaced by a wet red slit. Clear- ly, the season is to be 'challenging', even `subversive'. Once inside, these twinges are confirmed. One of the pieces 'explores deafness', another is based upon Artaud's Theatre of Cruelty version of the Cenci story, promising incestuous rapine at the very least; only the third, adapted from a Grimm Brothers' fairy-tale, seems to offer hope of lyric bliss and operatic necessity. Since all three composers are new to me I have no preconceptions where the music is concerned. My fundamental desire always is to be delighted. Critical reservations are merely an elaboration of the degree of dis- appointment experienced in this apparently modest goal.
Expectation then is two lows and a high. But it's always nice to have expectation confounded; and there is no way to know except by actual attendance.
Attendance at The Cenci became an ordeal after the first few minutes. Here expectation was fulfilled. The medium, combining instrumental music with actors, without singing, is interesting and poten- tially rich, detaching the genre from its arti- Boyish, Tom Cruise lookalike wants to meet girl with good sense of humour.' fice and convention to yield 'freedom of speech' — speed, audibility, naturalness interacting with and articulated by the music in new ways; experimental without the negative. Not so here: this was the new of yesteryear, looking new and sounding very old indeed. The words were few enough to have been sung without loss. Hearing them in all their nakedness, shamelessly hammed up by the actors, was to relive a thousand dire Third Programme drama presentations. Somehow this elocu- tion that underlines in triplicate has sur- vived to embarrass the Nineties as it embarrassed the Fifties.
The set was a bare ramp; imagery (corny and sometimes ludicrous) billowed from two video screens and from the floor itself; the single prop was the noose by which Beatrice, having been duly ravished by her depraved father, is hanged for colluding with her (similarly outraged) mother in his death. What with all this, Giorgio Battistel- li's score proved little more than back- ground noise, unrefined and generalised, busy scurry with violent interruptions (soon predictable), stereotyped rent-a-texture modernism, pitches grey as asphalt, till the equally hackneyed 'religious' ending-chant, turning to polyphony, on the strings, bells and chorus swelling ever louder from the tape, the winds and percussion throwing in an occasional expressionist clamour to sig- nal that irony and alienation were in play.
Nor did the German romantic fairy-tale of The Juniper Tree provide assuagement. The tale is at once poetic and bloody; with- in its simplicities lie great depths. Music and staging respected the ambience but found no style with which to render it afresh. Behind Roderick Watkins's score lie Holst's Savitri, the gentler side of Birtwistle, and Britten's Curlew River. Another British Curlew came surprisingly to mind, Peter Warlock's melancholy set- tings of Yeats, initially became of the pre- dominant cor anglais (marvellously played), then in the increasing dependence on droopy melisma. Rhythm is limp throughout, the voices sing largely a flavourless recitative, in a uniform pacing where even the most dramatic or affecting moments scarcely ruffle the placid even- ness.
In spite of the three cellos in the 12- piece ensemble, the prevailing sound is ascetic; yet though intervals are harsh, soft- grained spacings unfocus the harmonic direction, and its instrumentation depends too much upon glitter-percussion rather than its being the magically right notes that resonate and shine. Yet there is a fragile beauty here; prettiest when live instru- ments return (after a vapid foray into elec- tronics) as the murdered boy, now transformed into a bird, sings with his half- sister and his lost mother; most substantial is the accumulation of long single notes, piling up into exactly dissonant chords as the revenging millstone hangs in the air ready to crash down on the wicked step- mother; and very pretty again at the end in which the four non-wicked ones — living, dead, resurrected — sing together under gentle chirruping birdcalls.
Helmut Oehring's Dokumentation I is from the first moment on a different plane. Reading the interview where he talks about deafness in his 'childhood, one is inclined to dismiss the dependence upon the deficien- cy as adventitious advantage-taking. Scan- ning his worklist one has to say that he seems to be milking this vein rather hard. But when one sees and hears his piece at the Almeida, such reservations are con- quered.
The stage is the ramp for The Cenci with- out meretricious videos; there is no plot; even the action is minimal. Three deaf women huddle together then move apart in changing alignments, then move together again. To each side is a chair plus stand, occupied by a singer (counter-tenor to the right, to the left the remarkable `sopranist' David Newman); occasionally they interact with the deaf women and occasionally recede from the action by sitting down. I couldn't catch any words. The singers' long lines conceal the syllables, the women grunt in radically impaired German. Utter- ance as something expressive comes only in the voluble but silent play of gesture in their sign-language (which I also don't understand). Yet this, little though it be, suffices like the bare necessities of Noh. Whereas an accompanying video showing confused images of London streets, bridges, tunnels, seen from a travelling car, while feeble in itself, is also pointless, the one disparate element in a minimalist mix wherein every- thing else carried weight. Emphatically including the score.
Its description would seem wholly con- trary — dislocuted, fragmentary, obsessive, perverse (even strangulated — the grotesquely down-tuned violin and cello), ugly, sadistic, unmusical. Yet from first moments to last an hour later, one was compelled by the authority of a marvellous accurate ear. Brutalist minimality has been rendered with such finesse as to emerge in the end oddly sensitised (though by no means gelded). When this inventive tissue of noise both pitched and unpitched tended towards a recognisable little song shape, the feeling was of inevitability brought about by craft and skill, rather than the groan of unshriven cliché as choirs and bells came on to see the Cenci ladies off, or as a shy wimpish nursery-rhyme flitted in and out of the boy's music under the juniper tree. And towards the end, in the long-held notes of the two singers — pierc- ing against each other with pain, pleasur- able in its precision — and in the ensuing descent towards fade-out and collapse, a master hand can be heard.
So far as this Almeida season goes, experimental music-theatre is here vindi- cated and becomes, therefore, opera, if of an exceedingly strange kind.
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