Curlew River

This is a strange blend of Japanese Noh theatre, modern opera and Christian morality. Three masked black-robed protagonists (the Ferryman, the Traveller and the Madwoman) are engaged in a journey across a river, during which it transpires that the shrine on the other side covers the grave of the Madwoman’s missing son.

Britten wrote the music after a trip to the Far East and it’s an adventurous piece in which he experiments with various new techniques. The programme puts it a lot better than I could: “...different instruments and voices sound the same melody to different rhythms; the result is an aggregate of notes that holds the melody in a vertical plane but doesn’t anticipate an expected direction from the ‘chord’.” This with Britten’s talent for running haunting snippets of melody through the piece like echoes makes the whole thing very exciting to listen to, especially when it’s as impeccably-performed as it was last night.

Either you like this kind of thing or you don’t. I do, and I thought both piece and production were excellent: very smooth, spare choreography that enlivened the story without distracting from the music; powerful, precise, professional performances from the lead singers and musicians and excellent support from the chorus.

If complex dramatic musical theatre is at all your sort of thing, do go and try to catch it tonight: you’ll love it. If it’s not, keep well away. If you’re not sure whether it is or not, give it a go – it’s only an hour long and there’s loads to listen to.

Miranda Rose (DI Staff), 01/03/06

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