Where the Wild Things Are/Higglety Pigglety Pop!, Aldeburgh Festival, review

Where The Wild Things Are: * * * *

Higglety Pigglety Pop!: * *

I've never been convinced by the merits of “opera for children”, preferring to believe that they should grow up assuming that elements of music and singing are normal parts of any theatrical activity. The post-Renaissance tradition of opera, with all its peculiar conventions, is probably something best left for maturity.

Most of what describes itself as “opera for children” is not so much “for children” as “about children” – in other words, an attempt from an adult perspective to recapture and explore lost innocence. Ravel’s L’Enfant et les sortilèges falls into this category, as does Oliver Knussen’s adaptation of Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are, revived here to open this month’s Aldeburgh Festival.

For us grown – ups, it’s a delight, with gorgeously sensual and richly textured music embodying a plot that illustrates the need that infants have for imaginative freedom as well as domestic security. Yet for a child, it is surely just too sophisticated. It offers nothing you can sing along with or tap your feet to, and given that the central role of Max is written for a high soprano, it’s inevitably hard to hear the words.

Aldeburgh has nevertheless done the work proud. Ryan Wigglesworth conducts the Britten Sinfonia in an exuberant account of the multi – coloured score, and the staging is imaginative – in a collaboration with Sendak sadly cut short when he died last month, Netia Jones and Lightmap have realised the classic illustrations in the form of animated video, with which Max (the excellent Claire Booth) interacts. The quintet of Wild Things is first-rate; I just don’t think the seven-year-olds in the audience really got it.

Even less engaging was Higglety Pigglety Pop! Based on one of Sendak’s less successful stories, about a terrier called Jennie who leaves home in search of adventure, its rambling and perplexing narrative proves operatically intractable, and Knussen’s music founders and drags as it follows all its weird convolutions. Put bluntly, it’s a bore, and the children near me were left exhausted and fractious by its meandering bagginess. Aldeburgh’s founding father, Benjamin Britten, would have had some sharp things to say about its lack of concision.

The same production team and cast as used in Where the Wild Things Are did a sterling job, with the admirable Lucy Schaufer taking the lead.

Aldeburgh’s Artist in Residence, Knussen received the Critics’ Circle Award after the performance, which also marked his 60th birthday. He has an exceptional and still underrated talent, but I don’t think that this awkward double bill is the happiest way to celebrate it.