ARTS
Opera
Life after Stockhausen
Rodney Milnes
Tornrak (WNO, Cardiff) Robin Holloway ought to be writing this: he knows far more about his opera than I do. But despite a healthy tradition of people reviewing their own work in these pages, and reviewing it well (in the sense of perceptively), it is not to be. Yet I hope that at a later date when the dust has settled he will write about the experience of hearing for the first time a major work conceived over 20 years ago, completed seven years later, and then sitting around unperformed for 13. There is no doubt that Clarissa should have been staged long ago, Vivian Tierney as Clarissa at the Coliseum if for no other reason than that Holloway is an important composer, yet oddly enough the time-lapse seems curiously apposite, and for two reasons.
In the 1970s a neo-romantic score sug- gesting none too shyly that there was life after Stockhausen would have been sat on hard by the press, if not the public, and Dr Holloway would not have been seen at the best dinner tables. Today, when Darm- stadt is just another small town in Ger- many, one welcomes such gorgeous, in- stantly appreciable music as one would an oasis after ten years in the Sahara, while recognising just as instantly that there is great substance beneath the lusciousness and that one will have to hear Clarissa again and again before coming to appreci- ate its true worth.
Secondly, an opera conceived in the Sixties — when (as far as I can remember) sex was invented — that deals in a compas- sionate, grown-up way with chastity and rape would probably have been laughed off the stage in the Seventies. Today, we all feel rather differently about such matters (I haven't even contemplated rape for a good nine years) and there have been newspaper articles celebrating the fact that sex is no longer compulsory. Stephen Fry's delicious remarks on the subject are unfortunately not quotable in a family magazine. Com- pulsory or no, ungovernable lust and re- sulting violence are with us still, and suitable cases for operatic treatment. Again, Clarissa seems horribly timely.
Apart from being rhapsodically beauti- ful, Holloway's score is also extremely witty; the quotes and near-quotes from composers that he loves — Wagner, Ravel, Debussy, Strauss — are used in the most urbane and informed way. It is also daring: the tonal finale for Clarissa's Liebestod and Assumption makes Gounod's Faust sound positively ascetic. Perhaps it was this that drew a single, mindless 'boo' at curtain-fall from some unreconstructed citizen of Darmstadt. But the simple fact remains, especially in the theatre, that if there are common chords lurking about (ugh!), then equally common discords are doubtly effective (and vice versa). Clarissa is a young man's opera — Holloway's Dutchman or Nabucco (how one looks forward to his Mastersingers and Rigoletto!) — and exhilaratingly uncom- promising. Practically speaking, it is sus- tained on its near-three-hour journey by the soprano and tenor leads, and I have nothing but praise for the heroic way in which Vivian Tierney and Graeme Matheson-Bruce shouldered their burdens.
Perhaps for the first revival the composer might consider the odd nip and tuck in their long solos, and he should certainly turn his attention to the central monologue/dialogue section of the first act, which is far too long. He will doubtless reply next week that I am too short.
I shall cravenly duck the subject of David Pountney's production, save to say that I am a sucker for fire-eaters, that I thought it wonderfully designed (David Fielding) and lit (Paul Pyant), and that I found the rape and its aftermath extremely painful, simply because of the combination of music and stage action. Would it have been as painful with the curtain down? I wonder. Oliver Knussen's devoted con- ducting was, like the singing, beyond praise.
Just one complaint: audibility of the words. This was not only a matter of balance; British singers seem to be losing the art of projection, in this of all houses. Is there no one on the staff to go to them after the first orchestral rehearsal and say, 'Absolutely lovely, darlings, but I can't hear an expletive-deleted word'? I may apply for the job, but would never have to speak thus to an old trouper like Eric Shilling, who gives the game away by making every syllable effortlessly audible. By coincidence, another defiantly tonal opera, John Metcalf s Tornrak, was pre- miered in Cardiff the following evening. Heavy critics may say that it didn't aim very high, which is arguable, but at least it knew where it was going and unarguably got there. A busy narrative about a ship- wrecked sailor and an Inuit maiden in the Canadian Arctic, their adventures in Victorian England and their tragic deaths is contained within two acts of under an hour each, and the attention is gripped throughout. Metcalf s musical language may be heavily indebted to Britten and Tippett, but there are worse banks on which to draw if you are writing for the theatre, and the admixture of authentic Inuit throat singing adds spice. (`Inuit' is the proper word for what used to be `Eskimo', and a Tornrak' is an animal guardian spirit — an owl, a wolf or whatever.) The production by Mike Ashman is a triumph of ingenuity over meagre re- sources (Black Theatre techniques cleverly used for the Tornraks) and I am a sucker for polar bears. There are powerfully committed performances of the two (again) leading roles by Penelope Walker and David Owen, and Richard Armstrong conducts. Tornrak will be on tour for the next two months, and is warmly recom- mended. So, it goes without saying, is the Holloway.
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