In an operatic career spanning 50 years, Harrison Birtwistle has almost compulsively turned to ancient myths for inspiration. The operas in this new double-bill both draw on pre-Christian stories. Each lasts 45 minutes and deploys just two singers and an ensemble of six musicians, visible onstage throughout and almost part of the action in The Corridor, a re-imagining of the story of Orpheus and Eurydice.
Here, Eurydice resents Orpheus’s attempt to rescue her from death. Self-absorbed and lonely, he is left with a box of memories to sift through, his musical accompaniment a single harp that is not consolatory but neurotic and hectoring. Eurydice, by contrast, is permitted to step out of her singing character to deliver spoken soliloquies that have a vindictive humour; Birtwistle even allows her a few sly dance rhythms.
The Cure, meanwhile, is a prequel to the story of Medea killing her children to punish her husband Jason. Here, Jason calls on her sorcerous skills to allow Aeson, his dying father, a few extra years of life. The twist is that Aeson would rather die now than endure the process of decay all over again. A further twist is that one singer plays both Jason and Aeson: the quick role-changes become inadvertently comic.
Martin Duncan’s production is admirably direct while Alison Chitty’s designs have the pregnant simplicity of a children’s picture-book. Under conductor Geoffrey Paterson, the musicians, all from London Sinfonietta, play with virtuosic delicacy (Helen Tunstall makes the harp a force of nature) while the singers, Mark Padmore and Elizabeth Atherton, are in blazing form, every note wrenched from their body with piercing intensity.
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Yet somehow it doesn’t quite cohere. David Harsent’s libretto is leaden, while the ritual repetitions, once Birtwistle’s escape-route from linear narrative, have become his straitjacket.
Until Saturday (020 7304 4000, roh.org.uk)
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