February 23, 2009
It shouldn’t be forgotten that folk, in whatever form it takes, originated among the poorest and most threatened strata of society. Indeed, that’s almost what defines it – I’ve heard hip-hop plausibly described as the only form of folk music ever to come out of a city.
This, perhaps, is what Harrison Birtwistle and Michael Nyman were getting at in the first of this evening’s two fascinating pieces, Down by the Greenwood Side. Nyman’s libretto takes as its foundation two English folk ur-texts – the mumming play and the child-murder ballad, and weaves them together in a single piece set not in some rural idyll of the past, but among urban tramps and derelicts who are perhaps, in their lives of powerlessness and desperation, as close as we can now get to the oppressed peasantry among which they were created.
It’s more a piece of musical theatre than an opera – the mumming play is spoken and danced by four male actors who harangue both audience and orchestra as they tell their tale of St George killed and reborn, while soprano Claire Booth continually interrupts them with her tragic aria. Birtwhistle’s score, knotty, gestural and violent, drives them both to a tragic conclusion.
Booth returns to the stage, joined by mezzosoprano Susan Bickley and playing multiple parts in Into the Little Hill. This also draws on folk talkes – this time that of The Pied Piper of Hamelin. George Benjamin’s music is more fluid than Birtwhistle’s, and weaves around both singers without ever drowning out their crisp delivery, while at the same time expressing the multiple characters they play with subtle shifts of tone.
Martin Crimp’s excellent, allusive libretto begins as an unsettling fairy story with vague satirical overtones. Then Booth, as the Minister’s child, asks her mother why the rats are clothed and carrying bags, and the spectre of genocide looms into focus. The script is full of pitch black humour (‘we spent it’, the Minister explains when the piper asks about his money, ‘on barbed wire and education…’) and startling, poetic images – the rats flowing like ‘hot metal’ to their doom.
It’s also enhanced by a clever stage device – a large circle with black mesh stretched across it on which key fragments of the libretto are projected. The truth of what has been done remains beamed on to the stage, despite the desparate attempts of the characters to cover it up.
This, perhaps, is what Harrison Birtwistle and Michael Nyman were getting at in the first of this evening’s two fascinating pieces, Down by the Greenwood Side. Nyman’s libretto takes as its foundation two English folk ur-texts – the mumming play and the child-murder ballad, and weaves them together in a single piece set not in some rural idyll of the past, but among urban tramps and derelicts who are perhaps, in their lives of powerlessness and desperation, as close as we can now get to the oppressed peasantry among which they were created.
It’s more a piece of musical theatre than an opera – the mumming play is spoken and danced by four male actors who harangue both audience and orchestra as they tell their tale of St George killed and reborn, while soprano Claire Booth continually interrupts them with her tragic aria. Birtwhistle’s score, knotty, gestural and violent, drives them both to a tragic conclusion.
Booth returns to the stage, joined by mezzosoprano Susan Bickley and playing multiple parts in Into the Little Hill. This also draws on folk talkes – this time that of The Pied Piper of Hamelin. George Benjamin’s music is more fluid than Birtwhistle’s, and weaves around both singers without ever drowning out their crisp delivery, while at the same time expressing the multiple characters they play with subtle shifts of tone.
Martin Crimp’s excellent, allusive libretto begins as an unsettling fairy story with vague satirical overtones. Then Booth, as the Minister’s child, asks her mother why the rats are clothed and carrying bags, and the spectre of genocide looms into focus. The script is full of pitch black humour (‘we spent it’, the Minister explains when the piper asks about his money, ‘on barbed wire and education…’) and startling, poetic images – the rats flowing like ‘hot metal’ to their doom.
It’s also enhanced by a clever stage device – a large circle with black mesh stretched across it on which key fragments of the libretto are projected. The truth of what has been done remains beamed on to the stage, despite the desparate attempts of the characters to cover it up.