Opera: An Ocean of Rain (Aldeburgh Festival) **
If the fate of new opera in Scotland - already championed in January by Ian Rankin et all in Scottish Opera’s 5:15 venture - rested solely on the fact that last Friday, a Scottish-originated opera nabbed the prestigious opening concert at Aldeburgh, the internationally renowned seaside festival founded by Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears, then things would be looking very good indeed.
But experimental opera - and this was such a thing - is always going to be controversial, doubly so on such a high-profile occasion, and sadly An Ocean of Rain, conceived by director Cathie Boyd of Glasgow-based company Cryptic, with a nebulous libretto written in the wake of the 2004 Asian Tsunami (involving its unlikely and jarring transplantation to Haiti) by Canadian writer Daniel Danis and music by Amsterdam-based British-Cypriot composer Yannis Kyriakides, did not quite work either as opera or music theatre.
There were some intriguing moments. Refreshingly contemporary in its musical and visual language, An Ocean of Rain’s concept and ambition - particularly in Kyriakides’s sophisticated interweaving of electronics and acoustic - stood in contrast to some of the more traditional results of this year’s 5:15 output, for example. Boyd’s style suited the concept, and underlined its faults, but it looked good, too.
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An elegy on human and natural destruction revolving - although you might be hard pressed to realise it, given the inaudibility of much of the amplified libretto- around a young Haitian orphan (Kiev) turned prostitute-on-the-run after the killing of a western sex tourist, the aesthetic is atmospherically created amid Zerlina Hughes’s colour-soaked lighting, John Otto’s post-storm beach detritus, and disturbing visuals by Julia Bardsley.
But none of this could mitigate for the fundamental problems with the score and, indeed, libretto itself. Kyriakides’s professed distrust of operatic conventions - the “too beautiful” operatic voice, the extremes of dramatic emotion - resulted in a forced and flat musical language which conspired deliberately to keep its audience at a distance. The part of Kiev has the kind of emotional thrust and narrative which cries out for operatic vocal treatment, but her part was entirely spoken in a deliberately declamatory, disjointed manner.
Part of this seems conceptual, Kyriakides underscoring the sense of disembodiment found in the libretto, but his solution is the musical equivalent of a poem where every line is end-stopped, giving the vocal lines a stilted manner which gives the characters no space to develop.
There is virtually no change of pace in an opera that tries so hard not to be an operatic opera, and ends up overworked.
The following morning, the festival proceeded on more familiar ground at the Church of St Peter and St Paul (burial place of Britten and Pears) with the ever-popular vocal group I Fagiolini in a programme of sixteenth-century composer William Byrd. As director Robert Hollingworth pointed out, Byrd’s mesmerising polyphony was considered deeply unfashionable by his contemporaries - even his patron “found it difficult to make sense of”. Which just goes to show that the path to perfection in any artform is never smooth.
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