A collision regarding audio worlds makes for an interesting twice-statement
A blink-and-you’ll-miss-it home-based farce and a temperature-fantasy fantasy away from a track-cycle: Stravinsky’s Mavra (1922) and Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire (1912) make for an unexpected double-expenses. But, in case the one or two remain slightly awkwardly alongside both, they are both facing in identical guidelines – each looking to brand new musical earlier in the day.
Mavra/Pierrot Lunaire, Linbury Cinema comment – operatic madness tempered with plenty of method
Passacaglias and fugues, love-duets and you may ensembles, waltzes and you may folksongs: they are fragments gained right up by several composers less interested when you look at the tearing down the musical organization in the very beginning of the 20 th century than just re also-purposing it, flexing and you may skewing the new parts to fit the anxiousness out of a beneficial new age.
Nervousness, tipping with the frustration, paranoia and you can downright madness, is the defining temper regarding Anthony Almeida’s the fresh new presenting, formulated within the Regal Opera’s 20 th wedding festivals to the business’s Jette Parker Young Artist programme. Developer Rosanna Vize takes the latest “magic light flowers” of Pierrot’s attention and you may blows them right up on a big flowery pattern: a large chintz you to establishes the fresh new tone on unique, circus-domesticity regarding Mavra where teas-tables come packed with jelly (and nothing more), pastels and you may prim silhouettes burst to the outrageous wigs and you may red-colored eyebrows, and you will crinolines hide holsters of squirty solution.
The story (predicated on Pushkin’s The little Household in the Kolomna) is easy enough: Parasha misses the girl boyfriend Vasily, and when her mom laments the loss of the latest family’s loyal retainer Fyokla, she conspires to create the girl lover on the domestic in the guise out of “Mavra” a different sort of housemaid. Cue most of the antique comical-opera shenanigans.
The fresh slightness from Mavra (hence lasts barely 30 minutes) offers a movie director little shoulder-room, and you will Almeida makes the interesting phone call to bleed you to definitely crisis strona randkowa bhm on several other, uniting the two disparate halves inside a provided globe where a large clinging light gets the newest moon one to guides Pierrot’s madness. Pierrot themselves strays on the Parasha’s teas-class, and later Parasha and her relatives reappear during the Pierrot’s individual aspirations.
Meaning remains oblique, but tethering Mavra so you’re able to anything larger lends anticipate heft so you can their arch satire. Anything primal was stirring when you look at the Almeida’s dolls household, experienced not just in the new slithering clarinets and away from-kilter dances out of Stravinsky’s get (crisply introduced by the Britten Sinfonia below Michael Papadopoulos) but in characters who plunge the fingertips American Pie-build towards the bowls of jelly, smear themselves inside the solution and strip down on the lingerie.
Jette Parker singer April Koyejo-Audiger will bring a lot of vibrant-eyed naughtiness to help you Parasha, this lady soprano swelling amply through Stravinsky’s ensembles, but possibly spilling away from securely mathematical outlines established by Papadopoulos, smudging slope. She seems to fall under a separate opera to Egor Zhuravskii’s clean Vasily (pictured best) – darkly Russian build conference bel canto control and sweet. Sarah Pring shines given that Parasha’s put-through to mom (barely clinging in order to sanity right here) having Idunnu Chewing including certain zesty frustration since Neighbor. It’s all a good enjoyable and doesn’t overstay the anticipate. But it is next 50 % of in which this show most goes into its own. Soprano Alexandra Lowe (envisioned significantly more than) is actually Schoenberg’s moon-struck Pierrot – carrying this lady audience owing to every change away from aura and you will reputation: now an effective Madonna mourning inside a kinky Pieta, now an effective murderous revenger drilling through his rival’s head to cigarette it such as for instance a pipe.
Stilling new layouts following clutter and chaos off Mavra, Almeida lets the experience go on to Lowe’s face and the entire body, tellingly lit because of the Lucy Cartermitting certainly to each and every reinvention, from cabaret-vocalist in order to crawling creature, ballroom performer and androgynous spouse, Lowe gives us insanity that’s never ever quicker one perfect, underpinned reduced by the whimsy we quite often find than just a much slower-bubbling fury and you may anger. New command over Lowe’s sprechstimme, plucking pitches on heavens, morphing the lady tone in order to reflect or race brand new orchestra’s flute otherwise clarinet, are natural: a very carefully calibrated negotiation ranging from speech and song. Madness would be anarchic, but it’s so much more powerful as soon as we have the hidden purchase and you can reason even as we carry out right here.