Hell is other people. Even if Sartre was mistranslated, don’t expect a denial from anyone emerging gratefully from Thomas Adès’s The Exterminating Angel – in which a roomful of dinner party guests are inexplicably rendered unable to leave, and brought to anarchy by thirst, hunger and sheer proximity. I say gratefully only because the opera – based on Luis Buñuel’s 1962 surrealist film – is so discombobulating that one half expects to encounter some kind of force field at the Covent Garden doors.
This is Adès’s third opera. It was premiered last summer at the Salzburg festival, and heads to New York’s Metropolitan Opera in the autumn. Tom Cairns’s production attempts to immerse us even before the opera starts: we take our seats surrounded by the sound of bells as three live sheep are paraded on stage; later, following an ovine version of Chekhov’s gun, these become lamb shawarmas as the orchestra plays a nightmarish version of JS Bach’s Sheep May Safely Graze.
It is a joke characteristic of Adès, whose score once again shows a composer at ease with the idea of picking up any number of references and hanging them on music all his own. Those who charge him with self-conscious cleverness will be able again to do so – and he doesn’t help himself by having one character beg the diva guest to sing “something by Adès”, as if he thinks he is Don Giovanni at his final dinner. But this is a far less brittle score than his 1995 chamber opera Powder Her Face, lusher than 2004’s The Tempest, and Adès is more willing to linger in music of unabashed beauty.
The duet for the young couple – Ed Lyon and Sophie Bevan – falls into the cadences of a lute song; the fussiest guest – Iestyn Davies – laments incorrect cutlery in a bittersweet Mahlerian dirge. A new sound for Adès is that of the ondes martenot, played by no less than Cynthia Millar, its pure-toned electronic swoops adding a B-movie sci-fi feel which, in the context of Hildegard Bechtler’s 1960s-chic costumes and set, recalls Hartnell-era Doctor Who. Yet actual horror is never far from the surface, and the early hints of Straussian Viennese waltzes give way to quicksand harmonies as order breaks down.
Would a more detached conductor than Adès himself have shaped some of the transitions more carefully, or encouraged greater precision of attack from the strings? Perhaps, but the orchestra plays persuasively for him. The main cast is as in Salzburg, and reads like a starry cross-generational roll call: John Tomlinson, Thomas Allen, Anne Sofie von Otter, Christine Rice. Charles Workman is excellent as the host, Amanda Echalaz imperious as the hostess, but you have to read her words on the surtitles – which, as is their wont, kill most of what verbal jokes there are. Audrey Luna sings at dog-whistle pitch in a deliciously catty portrayal of Leticia, the opera singer who may unknowingly hold the key to the whole mystery. What is that key? Buñuel wasn’t saying. Adès isn’t either, but it might be music itself.
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