View: Next message | Previous message Next in topic | Previous in topic Next by same author | Previous by same author Previous page (May 1999, week 3) | Back to main OPERA-L page Join or leave OPERA-L Reply | Post a new message Search Options: Chronologically | Most recent first Proportional font | Non-proportional font ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Date: Sun, 16 May 1999 00:43:42 +0000 Reply-To: "H.E.Elsom" Sender: Discussion of opera and related issues From: "H.E.Elsom" Subject: Orpheus Frequency, BAC, 15May99 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" The Orpheus Frequency, presented by English National Opera Studio for BAC, devised and directed by Carlos Wagner, music direction and arrangements by Richard Chew Jeremy Birchall, Andrew Burden, Sophe Grimmer, Jozik Koc, Cheryl Pickering Richard Chew (keyboard), Philip Shepherd (electric cello) This electric cello was a normal one -- fingerboard only. In a bad-taste joke in his Art of poetry, Horace comments that even if you move the words of poetry around to form prose, you can still always spot the scattered parts of the poet. Your school edition says Horace uses "poet" instead of "poetry" to make it scan, but it's really an allusion to Orpheus getting torn to bits and scattered over the Thracian countryside by the Maenads. Ovid, in the dead centre of the Metmorphoses, has Orpheus' head floating down a river still singing as an emblem of the way he himself fragments the normative narratives of epic poets into subversive, baroque poetry. The story of Orpheus is also the archetype of all fiction: boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl again, and, optionally, boy loses girl again and is torn to bits. And, for what it's worth, Orpheus is occasionally said to have invented homosexuality, philosophy and vegetarianism. A notice at the BAC box-office warns not of strobes but of raw meat on stage in the ENO studio's Orpheus Frequency. It's a set of (probably sheep's) entrails, still attached to a section of the intestine, one of the parts of the scattered poet that the five singers semi-reassemble around the slightly gory torso of a shop dummy at the start. The other bits include a dummy's head, with laurel crown and mask, and a rent lyre, actually a souvenir Irish harp. The whole assembly, briefly, represent a mixture of the visceral, the artificial and the aesthetic. Which is about right for this reassembly of fragments of Orpheus operas and other music which tell the story of Orpheus yet again. The works used include the Euridice of Peri (the first ever composer to write an opera), Monteverdi's Orfeo (the first complete surviving opera), Telemann's Orpheus, itself an assembly of texts in several languages and music in diverse styles. There's also a frantic bravura aria, representing Orpheus' frustrated desire after his second loss, from Pergolesi's Orfeo Cantata. The performance begins and ends with a synthesized rework of a pastiche baroque chorus from Krenek's Orpheus and Euridyke. (At least, I assume that's what it is -- I don't know this work at all. It's possible that Krenek recycled something himself, as Stravinsky did putative Pergolesi in Pulcinella.) Orpheus enters hell to a section from Stravinsky's Orpheus, leaves hell to Vaughan Williams' Orpheus and his lute, and is torn to bits to Offenbach's can-can. Tragic, controlled, Gluck is notably missing. The singers all wear untied strait jackets, presumably suggesting poetic madness, and also appropriate for the crazed maenads which they become at the end to re-fragment a fabric Orpheus filled with red cloth. There is some taped music, and images projected onto screens (oscilloscope images, geometric colours, home movies of childhood for the pre-snake pastoral, a still of (or similar to) the negatived road from Cocteau's Orphee for the journey to hell), and the snake is a section of communications cable. But the main effect, visceral and aesthetic, comes powerfully from the generally straighforward performance of the music and acting of the story. The singers perform the music appropriate for their voices, so that all and none of them are Orpheus. The other performers take acted roles as appropriate. The big bass Jeremy Birchalle is sinister as Charon or Pluto, standing between Orpheus and Euridice as they reach for each other in opposite directions but can't make contact after Orpheus looks back. The auditorium at BAC is quite small, and a couple of the singers seemed too loud. But all the performances were fine, musical and dramatic. Andrew Burden has a beautiful voice, perhaps a bit Anglican, but very effective in the Peri/Monteverdi fragments. The mezzo Cheryl Pickering was very forceful, and used an expressive range of vocal colours. The soprano Sophie Grimmer got elegantly demented in the Pergolesi aria. I had a choice between this and a version of Maeterlinck's Pelleas. I suspect the warning about raw meat tipped the balance, just because I was curious (and wanted to see if it was the obvious, a shoulder of lamb thrown into the auditorium from a maenad scrum at the end). But I think, poetic as Maeterlinck is, this forty-five minute performance somehow delivers almost everything you could want in an opera, in a way that makes it disturbing all over again. I hope the ENO Studio developes it into a full-scale work, with dance. Regards, Helen - H.E. Elsom he@helsom.demon.co.uk http://www.helsom.demon.co.uk/ ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Back to: Top of message | Previous page | Main OPERA-L page ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Back to the LISTSERV home page at LISTSERV.CUNY.EDU.