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Between Worlds
ENO’s Between Worlds at the Barbican: ‘waiting for the lights to go down, the mood could hardly have felt more emotionally preemptive’. Photograph: Tristram Kenton
ENO’s Between Worlds at the Barbican: ‘waiting for the lights to go down, the mood could hardly have felt more emotionally preemptive’. Photograph: Tristram Kenton

Between Worlds; Des Knaben Wunderhorn – review

This article is more than 8 years old

Barbican, London
Tansy Davies and Nick Drake’s 9/11 opera is daunting, difficult and simply told

Opera is often called the most contrived art form. A chorus singing “Can’t open an important PDF” or “Your voicemail is not working” – lines from Between Worlds by Nick Drake and Tansy Davies – will always sound odd. In its ability to suggest several things at once through a union of music and drama, opera can also prove the most expressive. Holocaust, atom bomb, Aids, child murder, incest, cannibalism have been set to music in the past decade, not all for the first time, for better and sometimes worse. New works on assisted dying and suicide are heading this way soon: The Last Hotel by composer Donnacha Dennehy and playwright Enda Walsh premieres at Edinburgh this summer; 4.48 Psychosis by Philip Venables, based on Sarah Kane’s last play, was announced last week as part of the Royal Opera’s 2015/16 season.

Given all this and the advance hubbub, an opera about 9/11 should have felt, as it were, just another harrowing night out. Instead, sitting in the Barbican theatre last week waiting for the lights to go down, the mood could hardly have felt more emotionally preemptive. Would I, without a job to do, be there by choice? Were we all voyeurs, and of what precisely? Would it be allowable to say afterwards, if so it proved, “I didn’t like it”? Even now, a week on, I would need to see it a second time to separate the subjective and the critically objective. Perhaps those uncertainties were part of what made it such an uneasy evening.

From the start, despite a storyline tracking the key events of that sunny September morning, the work felt like a requiem. That Between Worlds succeeded at all is a tribute to the seriousness of the creative team – not just Davies and Drake but the conductor Gerry Cornelius, director Deborah Warner, designer Michael Levine, lighting designer Jean Kalman and movement director Kim Brandstrup, as well as musicians and all involved. In this 90-minute “opera in 11 scenes”, for 15 singers, chorus and 36-piece orchestra, there was no theatrical exaggeration in the attempt to create a fictional journey through those hours in which the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center were attacked.

Rhian Lois (Younger Woman), Phillip Rhodes (Older Man), Eric Greene (Janitor), Clare Presland (Realtor) and William Morgan (Younger Man) in Between Worlds. Photograph: Tristram Kenton

The simple literalness could not be faulted: four nameless characters and a janitor going through common daily routines – hasty morning goodbyes, changing from trainers to heels, grabbing the day’s first coffee – until each action, as their fate was sealed, became unique and final: a young man (William Morgan) ringing his mother and sister; a power-dressed single mother (Clare Presland) telling the babysitter to love her soon-to-be-orphaned child; a husband (Phillip Rhodes) trying to make amends with his wife; a gay woman (Rhian Lois) blurting out words of love she had so far failed to utter. Down below, a mother (Susan Bickley) ululates as the horror dawns, then sits centre stage, bereft, in unforgettable elegy.

Only the Janitor (Eric Greene) musters any mood of acceptance. He and the Shaman (countertenor Andrew Watts), “walker between worlds, god of messages and transmissions”, form some bridge to an unspecified higher being. Both utter the instruction: “Don’t look down”, a sombre variant on that great operatic order to Orpheus, “Don’t look back”. In the penultimate scene, aerialists depicting the Janitor and the Shaman tumble and spin, metamorphosing from falling humans to flying birds. This wordless reverie – in the libretto called Dance of Air and Wire, for Earth – seemed a natural ending, rather than the chorus of grief which followed.

The open, three-tiered stage neatly divided the action: on the ground floor those in the city, watching events unfold; in the middle the four trapped office workers; up above, the Shaman witnessing all against the backdrop of a sunlit Manhattan morning. Warner’s preferred device of grouping the chorus, from which soloists step forward to sing, worked well for this chorally rich work. Cataclysms in the attack on the towers were indicated by cascading paper falling from on high in terrible debris.

Davies’s music, rarely fast, moves in slowly shifting harmonies, completely assured but as if, intentionally, aurally blindfolded; not unfitting for the circumstances. High string harmonics and harp, shuddering low woodwind and brass – alto flute and bass clarinet, bass trombone and tuba – and delicately scored percussion provided the sonic backdrop for the voices, mostly easy to hear even without surtitles. One tweet referred to the score as a “soundtrack”. I don’t think Davies, versatile and eclectic, her music hard to pigeon-hole, would object to the term as other composers might. It gives a sense of how the music supports rather than dominates.

German baritone Dietrich Henschel. Photograph: PR

The opposite was the case for an audiovisual performance of Mahler’s Des Knaben Wunderhorn (The Youth’s Magic Horn), sung with fine colour and nuance by the baritone Dietrich Henschel and played, with equal brilliance of detail and contrast, by the BBC Symphony Orchestra conducted by Alexander Vedernikov (and broadcast live on Radio 3). Mahler orchestrated only 15 of the songs, leaving the other nine in voice-and-piano form, here orchestrated by Detlev Glanert (b1960).

Accompanying the performance, a specially made film by the Catalan director Clara Pons was shown, exploring themes of love, dreams and war that run through the songs. This “Wunderhorn Project” (with other ensembles) has already had successful outings in Germany, Belgium and elsewhere. Other performances are planned. Whereas in Between Worlds, music and text were designed to fuse, here it was hard to see what was gained by adding another attractive nonlinear but non-essential element – especially at the expense of the all-important text.

Watch a trailer for Clara Pons’s Wunderhorn film.

The imagery – Thomas Hardy meets Joseph Roth – dwelled on winter landscapes, snowy graveyards, soldiers and lonely hillsides, with some violent sex, naked underwater swimming a la Bill Viola, and mankind’s expulsion from paradise added to the mix. Henschel gamely starred in the film too. Yet Mahler’s music and Henschel’s arresting onstage performance already saturated eyes and ears. He sang from memory, at least 100 minutes of music, apparently longer than the epic role of Wagner’s Hans Sachs. That was gripping enough in itself.

Star ratings (out of 5)
Between Worlds ***
Des Knaben Wunderhorn ***

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