Harrison Birtwistle's The Minotaur finds itself on BBC2 tomorrow night, Saturday 7 June, at 7.35pm. in a performance recorded at the Royal Opera House.
It may be available after broadcast on the BBC iPlayer - worth a check later.
Classical music programmes currently available on the iPlayer are Early Music and last year's Prom 48 (the Simón Bolivar Youth Orchestra)
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The Minotaur - Royal Opera House Covent Garden, 15 April 2008
It's hard to accuse Sir John Tomlinson of stealing the show when the whole thing was written specially for him. Even so, 45 minutes along, just as it started to drag a little, his first appearance jolted it back into life. Bull-masked and bare-chested, he roared and lowed the Minotaur into being, spotlit alone on the bare stage as the orchestra rose to a clamour beneath him. Talk about making an entrance.
The evening started well enough - glassy black sea rolling on a video screen, sighing strings, bass winds grunting ominously beneath. But then Ariadne and Theseus turned up. In Birtwistle's tale, the pair are grossly unsympathetic. She'll do anything to escape the prison of an island she shares with the Minotaur, including tricking the visiting Theseus into marriage. Theseus isn't interested in anything except the revenge-killing of the Minotaur. Hardly a pair of lovebirds.
Birtwistle's scoring here is almost serene; cool and translucent. The vocal thread leaps and jerks here and there, but never thrills. The spare, minimalist set - a sun, a sky, a sail - starts to look bare and dull. The joy spreads thin. Twenty minutes in, and I was counting down to the interval. Christine Rice and Johan Reuter sang splendidly and no doubt did what they were supposed to do, but like a family Christmas, the whole thing just probed the powers of human endurance a little too hard.
But with the entrance of the Minotaur, everything shifted up several gears. The music became bristling, abrasive and veryvery loud, with an army of percussionists spilling out from the pit and into the stage side boxes, and two more beating their drums on stage.
In Birtwistle's version of the tale, the Minotaur is not a dumb agent of destruction, he's a deeply sympathetic character, yearning to make sense of himself and his existence. (But managing the odd bit of beastly rape and murder in between).
Trapped in a bullring, egged on by a masked chorus, the Minotaur bellows inarticulately and gores his sacrificial victims with balletic grace. Then alone in a dream and gazing into the mirror of his future, he speaks, or rather sings, a caged handful of circling notes. Tomlinson's face, visible beneath his wire bull mask, emphasises the human shadowed beneath the beast. It's riveting and unsettling.
I still can't decide whether the near-repeat of the sacrifice and mirror-dream scenes increases or diminishes their impact - it's structurally elegant, but does it add anything?
I had more doubts about the Keres, mono-winged goth vultures who descend to feast on the Minotaur's sacrificial leftovers. Amanda Echalaz was brilliantly terrifying as their screeching leader, but shouldn't the Minotaur himself and his killings be the scariest thing on the stage?
Here are the t!ts, and yes they're more like the front of a ship than the front of a page 3 lady, but hay, countertenors can't grow their own. Ariadne had to get the ball of string tip somehow, and Andrew Watts, the Snake Priestess, provided it, gliding skywards, skirts trailing, stuttering in an arresting shriek. It was the closest the evening got to humour, a relief from the intensity of the soul-searching and bloodshed, but far too brilliantly executed to be a mere distraction.
Even the return of Theseus and Ariadne for some more dry interplay couldn't deflate the thrilling dénouement, where mortally wounded by Theseus, the Minotaur finally speaks, becoming human in death, a heartbreaking transformation from Sir John Tomlinson.
Clearly conscious of the responsibility in mounting this major premiere, Pappano had polished the orchestra to Berlin Phil-like perfection. Yes even the horns. I can't recall ever hearing the Royal Opera House orchestra play quite this immaculately - it certainly raises the bar for future productions.
One thing we probably won't see again though is £65 top price tickets - and anyone who imagines ticket prices don't affect the audience mix should have checked out the significant proportion of younger faces in the full house tonight.
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Punch and Judy - Music Theatre Wales, Royal Opera House Linbury Studio, 17 March 2008
It's Harrison Birtwistle season in London, with this Music Theatre Wales production of his Punch and Judy and the ENO's version at the end of April bookending a premiere, The Minotaur at the Royal Opera House.
It's been marketed by both producers as 'contemporary', and I suppose stood next to Gluck or Puccini, it is. And the composer is still very much alive.
But in fact this opera is forty years old. It dates from 1968, the time of the Beatles, Richard Nixon and black and white TV. I would have needed a puter the size of a cathedral to blog it, and you would have had to come here and read it over my shoulder.
Times have changed.
Reputedly, Benjamin Britten walked out of its Aldeburgh premiere all those years ago in disgust. Today, though the Royal Opera House sternly warns that the production is 'Not suitable for children', I suspect most tinies would adore its bright colours, loud noises, toonish violence and joyous teletubby Mr Punch. They would love to watch its blowtorching of Tiny Tears. And while perhaps not all in tonight's audience liked it, I doubt if any were shocked. With our expectations modified by forty years of popular culture, we can appreciate it for itself rather than the bold detour it may have seemed to represent.
Michael McCarthy's brilliantly unfussy production mirrors the brash and unfetching music. Costumes and gestures are bold, physical features grotesquely accentuated. Judy has a lumpy hairnet, Pretty Polly has brightly rouged cheeks. Punch carries his characteristic hooked nose strapped to his back like a rucksack, while his face is crudely painted.
Punch's goal is to woo and win the lovely Pretty Polly, but the core of the drama is the string of murders he commits en route -- baby, wife, lawyer and doctor then puppeteer, here presented as prop, actor, spectators and producer. The murders form a ritualistic cycle in the repetitions of Birtwistle's music, wonderfully emphasised in the staging. Rag doll effigies representing each victim one-by-one fill a line of hangman's nooses swinging over the little stage. The production takes an utterly literal view of the text, using set design and lighting to magnify fleeting references to details like colour and direction which change as Punch's journey progresses. Behind the puppet theatre in which most of the action takes place, the orchestra, the real people, can be seen throughout.
Some of the most abrasive extremes of the score are in the vocal lines, and although poor diction often obscured the text, the colours remained clear and intact. Gwion Thomas coped splendidly with the main role, and Jeremy Huw Williams with the many varied demands of the ringmaster-Choregos. Judy's merciless grating was faithfully rendered by Carol Rowlands.
There is nothing much resembling a tune in the whole hundred minutes. But with repetition the musical shapes became curiously memorable in conductor Michael Rafferty's intelligent reading.
I'd wondered beforehand about the wisdom of booking both of the Punch and Judy productions -- this is no Magic Flute. But who knows, maybe ENO can pull off something as riveting and accomplished as this. We shall see.
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