UK Edition
Review
A magnificent, acrobatic display from Thomas Adès - The Exterminating Angel, Royal Opera review
Few aspects of a critic’s job are tougher than assessing the worth of something you’ve never heard before, and the annals are replete with instances of masterpieces sneeringly dismissed and now-forgotten duds raved over. So I’m delighted to get a second chance to experience Thomas Adès’s third opera, which I greeted at its Salzburg Festival première last summer with modified rapture.
It’s based on a subtly surrealistic film of the early Sixties written and directed by Luis Buñuel, in which a party of dysfunctional socialites find themselves stuck at a dinner party that for some unfathomable reason – there is nothing physically restraining them – they are unable to leave.
As in the contemporary Lord the Flies, they slowly implode into variously forms of extreme and bizarre behaviour, before equally mysteriously finding a way back into the world – although their fate is left ambiguous. The fable has superficial political implications, but deeper human ones too: aren’t all our lives snared in some sort of invisible trap?
“Less means more” is an adage Adès doesn’t heed. Nobody could question the incandescent brilliance of this score, which opens with the summons of distant church bells, the scurry of servants and a long shimmering ensemble in which the guests politely greet each other.
Much of the remainder of the first act is reminiscent of Richard Strauss at his most bombastic and excessive. Every trick in the book is played with schoolboy flamboyance: the ondes martenot wails, sopranos shriek at their extremities, lusciously parodied Viennese waltzes float in the air and a cast of 14 principal characters struggles to establish its individual personalities.
It’s a magnificent acrobatic display, yes, but it’s also a bludgeoning sensory assault, culminating in a shatteringly intense orchestral interlude – a march to Armageddon that has no obvious relation to the macabre comedy of the dramatic situation.
As so often with Adès’s music, it matures as it simmers down and stops showing off: saturated in melancholy, much of the more reflective second half is truly magical and even insidiously moving, although the ending is slightly fudged.
All praise to a superbly integrated cast – Christine Rice and Anne Sofie von Otter among its brightest stars – and for Adès’s authoritative conducting. Tom Cairns’s staging is better lit and altogether clearer than it was in Salzburg. But the jury is out; I think Adès still has lessons on opera to learn.
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