The Importance of Being Earnest, BCMG, Barbican, review

The Importance of Being Earnest, performed by the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group, throws everything at Oscar Wilde's play - with surprising results.

Barbara Hannigan and Joshua Bloom
Staggering technique: Barbara Hannigan and Joshua Bloom Credit: Photo: Mark Allan

If you think of The Importance of Being Earnest as a masterpiece of honed wit and formal perfection, you’ll be appalled by what the maverick Irish composer Gerald Barry has done to it. Cutting Wilde’s text by two thirds and adding bits and bobs from Schiller (in German), he has turned it into a crazy Dadaist opera which ignores the play’s late-Victorian corsetry and its masked camp elegance.

Instead the plot and characters are painted in garish primary colours and fuelled with the abrupt farcical energy of a Tom and Jerry cartoon.

“Eclectic” is a word which doesn’t begin to cover Barry’s musical idiom. The opera opens with someone off stage bashing a piano in a chaotic wrong-noted path through Auld Lang Syne, and that tune makes further random unmotivated appearances later in the action, alongside snatches of Beethoven’s Choral Symphony. I have no idea why.

The brass dominates: spluttering, coughing, quacking, and – in the weird ululation of horns which accompanies Cecily’s entrance in Act 2 – whooping a hunting halloo. The percussion section includes a pair of steel-heeled fascistic jackboots. In calmer moments, the influence of Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress and Messiaen’s Turangalîla can be detected.

Vocal lines move very fast or very slow, sometimes phrased fragmentarily, sometimes shouted like a demagogue’s harangue over an orchestral barrage. Serialism is parodied, extremes of register are exploited: Lady Bracknell is sung by a bass, Cecily by a stratospheric soprano. Gwendolen and Cecily’s teatime encounter is conducted through megaphones and climaxes in the smashing of plates.

I started by loathing it all. I had unreservedly loathed Barry’s previous opera, The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, and this latest exercise seemed vacuously silly. But gradually my defences were breached by the score’s sheer uninhibited exuberance: there’s something both naively wide-eyed and ultra-sophisticated about it that I found enticing. And perhaps there is a comic-strip hysteria buried deep in Wilde, which it has taken a fellow Irishman to bring to the surface.

The quality of the performance was high. Thomas Adès conducted the virtuoso Birmingham Contemporary Music Group with panache, and the hard-working cast was particularly notable for the staggering technique of Barbara Hannigan’s Cecily and the manic intensity of Peter Tantsits’s Jack – in comparison with which Alan Ewing’s Lady B made a relatively pallid impression.

It’s all completely bonkers, but I went in grumping and came out grinning. What more can you ask?

Also at Symphony Hall, Birmingham (0121 780 3333), on Apr 28. The performance will be broadcast on BBC Radio 3 on May 19.

The Importance of Being Earnest: Seven magazine review, by John Allison

Seven rating: * * * *

As you might guess with Gerald Barry, whose previous opera was an adaptation of The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant for ENO, his new “anti-opera” The Importance of Being Earnest is about as far removed from Victorian manners as possible. Despite this, it still derives much of its wit from Oscar Wilde’s lines, at least those that remain in Barry’s pared-down libretto.

There is also something undeniably funny about the friction between Wilde’s text and Barry’s frenetic, brassy music, which requires machine-gun delivery of words and makes outlandish demands on its musicians: the argument between Gwendolen and Cecily, for example, is conducted through megaphones and accompanied by a percussionist smashing dozens of dinner plates.

Further anarchic extremes are supplied in the contrast between an imperious bass Lady Bracknell (Alan Ewing) and a pouting coloratura Cecily (Barbara Hannigan).

Indeed, everyone is pushed to extremes and the entire cast of this one-off Barbican concert worked hard. Thomas Adès, who also conducted the Los Angeles premiere last year, drove the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group with brilliant theatricality. This first European performance was a knockout, and stagings cannot be far off.