Poetry in motion
Henrietta Bredin talks to Peter Manning about taking risks and creating opportunities
There is an almost palpable forcefield of energy around Peter Manning. You expect a crackle of static to explode when he shakes your hand or wraps you in an enthusiastic hug. Concertmaster of the Royal Opera House orchestra, founder of the eponymous Manning Camerata chamber orchestra and now music director of Musica Vitae in Sweden, his relish for a challenge, for fresh stimuli, is voracious. He is a violinist, a conductor, and now a galvanising producer and artistic director. His current, most pressing preoccupation is with a fabulously multi-layered and ambitious project, the performance of a new opera he has commissioned, for the Manning Camerata to play. It is based on Seamus Heaney’s The Burial at Thebes (itself based on Sophocles’ Antigone), with music by Dominique Le Gendre, to be directed by the poet Derek Walcott, at the Globe Theatre in October.
You have to take a deep breath after such a pile-up of names and intriguing possibilities. How did this complex thing, about to burst onto the stage, come about?
‘It started ages ago, with all sorts of threads that ultimately came together. I’d picked up a copy of Derek Walcott’s ‘Omeros’, his poetic, St Lucian version of Homer’s ‘Odyssey’, and started reading it, not all at once, but in snatches, off and on. Then I met Dominique Le Gendre and a series of conversations with her about writing meandered through Ted Hughes and on to Walcott, who I thought she might have read because of coming from Trinidad herself, and on again to Seamus Heaney, who we both admired hugely, and beyond that to the whole idea of an ever-present story, an individual’s narrative journey. Over quite a long period we talked and talked and kept returning to this idea until it became obvious to me that we really had to do something about it.’ Manning strikes me as a classic example of someone who, while very far indeed from being foolish, is certainly prepared to rush in where angels fear to tread. Not having done something before would never present for him any sort of an obstacle. Back in the Eighties he left his job as leader of the London Philharmonic Orchestra to become a founding member of the Britten String Quartet, and from the very start of playing with them he was commissioning new music. When he asks people to do things, they tend to respond favourably. ‘It’s up to people like me to push things a bit, I think. There’s a lot going on culturally in this country but it can become a bit monochrome and I’m not happy about that. I like mixing things up. It’s taken me a long time to get where I am now, but as a performer I’ve probably been at the top of my game for quite a while and it seems natural to expand into this producing role. This will be the first major musical treatment of any work by Seamus Heaney and he’s tremendously excited about it. When I first approached Faber, his publishers, about The Burial at Thebes, they said all the usual cautious things but he just said absolutely, go for it. Which was wonderful.’ What Manning seems to do is create circumstances in which an organic creative process can flourish, with boundaries blurring at times between the roles of conductor, director, composer and writer. ‘Absolutely. It’s not that I’m writing Dominique’s music for her but I’ve been talking to her now for five years; we’ve shared everything from late-night conversations to breakfast, she knows my family well, I know her parents in Trinidad. So in terms of the shape of the orchestra, what sort of sounds should happen, how to keep a balance between the poetic reality of the text, the narrative and the theatrical element, our thinking has become entwined. We know what we want. As a conductor or artistic director, the first thing you have to think about is the very exact nature of co-operation. There has to be a real practical working arrangement between stage performers and musicians, and the primary creators. Seamus is incredibly open to that and Derek Walcott is extraordinary as a director. He works with performers in ways that can surprise them as much as it surprises the audience, changing a response to a passage by the way he interprets it. It’s a kind of alchemy — fascinating.’ There’s an avid delight in risk-taking here that puts a grin on Manning’s face and sets his blue eyes blazing. ‘I’m a practical musician, it’s what I do, and I reached a break-out point where I felt there was enough energy, an accumulation of understanding and knowledge, which would allow new work to emerge. Being a Mancunian, a northerner, is important to me, and as part of that my great hero, a massive inspiration to me, is John Barbirolli. He virtually recreated the Hallé Orchestra when he came back to England from New York in the early Forties, and he was a natural communicator who really understood the nature of working with people towards a common aim. It’s been a slow, gradual business for me, acquiring experience, and building projects takes time too; they have to gather their own shape. The Burial at Thebes has been three and a half years in the making. I want to encourage a proper discourse among artists about what is the nature of work, the nature of art. That discourse does happen to a certain extent but sometimes it misses the musicians, the actors, the artists themselves. Musicians can be a little bit myopic, sealed into specific corridors of activity which can preclude widening the experience. There’s a danger of areas of understanding and skill becoming so prescribed that the connection points will become frayed and no one will know what anyone else is doing.’ The finding of the right physical space in which to perform must have been crucial. ‘It certainly was. I knew we had to find a theatre where the audience would be closely engaged with the performers. It’s a chamber piece and we need that sort of intimacy — a big proscenium theatre was never going to work. I met Conrad Lynch, the executive producer of the Globe, and we got on very well, so the ball started rolling. I think it fits into Dominic Dromgoole’s artistic vision too, for expanding the repertory beyond Shakespeare. They’ve got a fantastic group of in-house musicians who are involved in most of their plays but they hadn’t tackled a purely music project before. The theatre has a spirit of openness, not least because it is open to the elements, and everything will be perfectly audible, which is essential to what we’re aiming for: maximum impact and total theatrical effect.’ Rehearsals for The Burial at Thebes start in September and Peter Manning is raring to go. ‘I wouldn’t have got anywhere if people hadn’t taken risks on me as my career developed. Now I can return the favour.’ ❑
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