Three live sheep, trained to the highest operatic standards, mooch on stage. Bells chime. Servants depart just as dinner guests in jewels and finery arrive. “Enchanted, enchanted”, they intone some two dozen times between them on variants of the same musical rise and fall. It’s the start of an evening that, for them, will prove anything but. Then they repeat the process, the orchestra scrunching and cavorting in elegant, seductive mayhem, a mood of crazed waltz in the air and sinister expectation. If these guests are enchanted, we the audience are already bewitched.
The world premiere of The Exterminating Angel by the British composer Thomas Adès (b 1971), long on the horizon, keenly awaited, took place on Thursday at the Haus für Mozart. It was the opening opera of the illustrious Salzburg festival, held in the city in which Mozart was born. (It is obligatory to add that he hated the place.) Salzburg has co-commissioned Adès’s new work, together with the Royal Opera Covent Garden (where it opens next spring), the Metropolitan Opera, New York, and the Royal Danish Opera. A 22-strong cast, including Amanda Echalaz, Anne Sofie von Otter, Sally Matthews, Christine Rice and Thomas Allen, gave a superb ensemble performance. When the composer, who also conducted, took his bow, the audience rose in prolonged ovation. This was a momentous evening: a turning point for Adès and, it felt, for opera itself. I am happy to put my neck on the line.
Luis Buñuel’s surrealist film El ángel exterminador (1962), on which the work is based, has no soundtrack but is steeped in music. The action takes place after a night at the opera. Friends – among them a diva, a pianist and a conductor – gather to dine but find they cannot leave. A strange spell, never explained, disables their usual social responses. The group descends into anarchy, while retaining just enough ingrained courtesy to remain human. When, after days without food, they make a fire from bits of furniture and roast the sheep, they wish each other “bon appetit”. All this with extermination in the air and, malodorously, in the closet, blood seeping under the door.
This exploration of a collapsed society is a natural choice for Adès, long drawn to the darkly comic or the inexplicable, whether in his operas Powder Her Face (1995) and The Tempest (2003) or, in contrasting ways, in large orchestral works such as Asyla, Polaris or Totendanz. A Buñuel fan might want to analyse how Adès and his librettist and director, Tom Cairns, have reshaped the original – tightening it from ponderous fantasy into macabre thriller – but we shouldn’t waste too much time on comparison. The fabulously inventive score speaks for itself. It’s as if all music is buoyantly alive and coexisting in its two-hour span: from Wagner to Mussorgsky, Bartók, Nielsen, Ravel, Shostakovich and Nancarrow; from 12th-century chanson to chaconne and choral polyphony, via flamenco and Stravinsky, forward into melody and backwards into dissonance.
This is no idle game of spot the composer. Prodigious from early childhood, Adès has devoured, lived and breathed everything that caught his ear, letting all manner of music nourish his imagination. We expect artists and writers to do this, yet with composers we inevitably reach for the adjective “eclectic” in a tone of mistrust. This precise quality is the essence of Adès’s style. It is easier to think of him as a musical polylinguist: in whichever tongue, the identity of the speaker is never in doubt. Patterns are set up, reshaped, challenged, subverted, all the strands, in every colour and ply, tightly woven and rhythmically daring.
The orchestration is enriched, or sometimes made mysteriously transparent, by prominent use of piano and low woodwind, as well as guitar, harp, tuba and tubular bells. In one interlude, drums thunder insistently, inspired by another Buñuel film, Drums of Calanda. Out of noisy, brassy eruptions, the ORF Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra playing full tilt and meeting every demand, exquisite arias float up. The countertenor Iestyn Davies sings a rapturous ode to coffee spoons – a new entry for that very short list of homages to inanimate objects headed by Puccini’s aria to an overcoat in La bohème. The tender suicide-pact duet sung by the young lovers Eduardo and Beatriz (Ed Lyon and Sophie Bevan) is another of the many potent highlights. Hovering above all, making ghostly, whooping and poetic interjections, is that electronic wonder instrument beloved of Messiaen, the ondes martenot, played by the world’s leading player, Cynthia Millar.
Cairns’s production keeps the action clear. The sheep may be real but the bear is mercifully a fiction, conjured by Tal Yarden’s video. Divided in two, the stage has a metallic rusticated wall to one side and a polished, Corbusier-like wooden arch to the other, which swivels to show the inhabitants re-entering society at the end: a succinct solution to a piece that ends suddenly, without barline or solution. With the cast on stage all the time – as in Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi, to which it feels distantly related – it takes a while to work out exactly which character is which and who is singing when. John Tomlinson as the Doctor, attempting to keep all under control and – rarely for an operatic bass – briefly finding himself an unexpected love object, was always visible and audible. So too was Audrey Luna as Leticia, who sang her fiendish high coloratura dazzlingly.
There are too many theatrical and musical coups to mention: the floating hand, the water spout moment, the lament to hunger, the climactic choral writing. In a recent interview Thomas Adès said he enjoyed the experience of conducing the piece so much it should be renamed “The Exhilarating Angel”. He has a point. Even from a passenger seat in the stalls, rather than in the cockpit, this angel soars aloft.
In his final opera, Béatrice et Bénédict, Berlioz takes a sliver of his beloved Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing and adds exquisite music. The overture is well known, rippling with slippery, quixotic rhythms, but the opera itself, with lumbering action and spoken dialogue, is not often performed. Strongly sung by soloists and chorus, with lithe playing from the London Philharmonic Orchestra under the baton of Antonello Manacorda, Glyndebourne’s new staging puts a fair case for a piece unlikely to become a repertory favourite.
The director Laurent Pelly, perversely, perhaps, though it all looked stylish, played with every shade on the grey scale – pale, silvery, cloudy, misty, watery – relying on the score to provide Technicolor variety. He was successful up to a point. Berlioz’s music is beguiling, with justly celebrated arias and duets (such as the duo nocturne Nuit paisible), but as an opera needs help.
Pelly and set designer Barbara de Limburg rooted the action in various flap-topped boxes which open to reveal chorus, bridal boudoir or pillow-laden bed. (All possible jokes about boxes, not to mention shades of grey, had been made by the end of the queue to the ladies in the dinner interval, so I will resist.) Costumes, beautifully detailed, and to Pelly’s designs, were mostly 1950s, though Béatrice – the effortlessly pert and alluring Stéphanie d’Oustrac, last year’s Carmen – appeared fixed in the decade before, with high-waisted pencil skirt and flat, practical shoes.
Fencing sparkily with Bénédict (a radiant-voiced Paul Appleby), she headed a lively ensemble cast in which the women, more interestingly portrayed anyway than the men, excelled: Sophie Karthäuser (Héro), Katarina Bradić (Ursule) and d’Oustrac herself. It was all too sombre. With cinema on the mind, Pelly could have borrowed a trick from Pleasantville (1998), the comedy fantasy that shifts from black and white into a bloom of colour. Berlioz, no stranger to hallucinations, might have enjoyed it.
Star ratings (out of 5)
The Exterminating Angel *****
Béatrice et Bénédict ***
- The Exterminating Angel is at the Salzburg festival on 1, 5 and 8 August. At the Royal Opera House, London, 24 April-8 May 2017
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