Clemency - Independent on Sunday Review

James MacMillan's opera weaves the longing for a child with the skewed vision of fundamentalism

Reviewed by Anna Picard

Has James MacMillan mellowed? Clemency, his latest opera, introduces the most complex of subjects in the most direct musical language.

The forces are modest (five singers and 24 strings), the score concise, only 45 minutes long. The hectoring ululations of his St John Passion have softened into an unaccompanied melismatic prayer, prelude to a simple meal. There are allusions to Tippett, Britten, even Palestrina, fluency and brightness in the sunburst arpeggios and golden halos of the orchestration. Most surprisingly, there is a hint of revulsion at the strident certainty of the three Angels who visit Abraham and Sarah on their way to raze Sodom and Gomorrah. 

Designed by Alex Eales, with a set in the form of a Flemish altarpiece, Katie Mitchell's Royal Opera House/ Scottish Opera co-production has simplicity and gravity. Having collaborated with MacMillan and his librettist, Michael Symons Roberts, on Parthenogenesis and The Sacrifice, she is attuned to their rhythms. The opera opens to ambient sounds – birdsong and aircraft. In one panel of the triptych, Sarah (Janis Kelly) kneads bread. In the second, Abraham (Grant Doyle) counts his earnings. The third is a mirror image of the second, allowing us to witness the dialogue from both sides.

The branches of an oak tree reach through a broken window into the room where Abraham offers food and shelter to three travellers (Andrew Tortise, Eamonn Mulhall and Adam Green). They enter as workmen and leave as assassins, an otherworldly dazzle of righteous triads in rhythmic unison. For certainty, read fundamentalism. The aircraft noise is the first of several references to 9/11. Having repaid Abraham's mitzvah with the miraculous news of Sarah's pregnancy, the triplets fulminate against the sins of the "twin towns". Abraham's pleas for mercy are ignored, leaving Sarah to contemplate motherhood with "gratitude and terror", as well she might, given this baby's future role as putative sacrifice. One life is given, thousands taken. Is this justice? 

Under Clark Rundell's calm, clear beat, the Britten Sinfonia realise MacMillan's score with bite, beauty and vigour. Nothing is lost by the lack of percussion, brass and woodwind. In the dry acoustic of the Linbury Studio, the divisi strings had an astonishing gleam, as did the trio of Old Testament hitmen. How much of Sarah's history with Hagar was in Kelly's characterisation? Was that guilt in her face? Jealousy? Mouth twisted into mirthless laughter or wild nausea, she is riveting, despite a challenging tesseratura and lyrics that ape the King James Bible, without matching its poetry. Doyle's Abraham is sympathetic and eloquent from his opening prayer to his futile imprecations. Best ignore the backstory and what later passes between him and Isaac, miracle child. 

Original review link here.

Clemency - The Observer Review

by Fiona Maddocks

Space is too short to celebrate in full the week's other premieres, each singular in style but abundant in rewards. James MacMillan's chamber opera Clemency, played by the expert and busy Britten Sinfonia strings, conducted by Clark Rundell, was as densely coloured and detailed as the Russian Orthodox icon which in part prompted it. Its starting point is the Old Testament story of Sarah and Abraham before the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. One can imagine that MacMillan and his librettist, Michael Symmons Roberts, wrote in a white heat of intensity.

The mood never lets up for the work's 50-minute duration. It ends too soon – scarcely a typical response to new opera. It's the best MacMillan score I have heard, full of muezzin-like chromaticism and, in the string style, a touch of Bartók, but firmly his own. Katie Mitchell's direction, Alex Eales's designs and the cast led by Janis Kelly and Grant Doyle were all excellent.

Original review click here

Clemency - Times Review

Mercy mission

James MacMillan moves with his new opera, while the Barbican celebrates Steve Reich's birthday in a packed two days

Paul Driver


The same weekend brought a new chamber opera at the Linbury, by the 51-year-old James MacMillan, and Reverberations, a sprawling Barbican celebration of the approaching 75th birthday of that American minimalist Steve Reich, setting him beside the many younger composers he has influenced

MacMillan’s music, though eclectic, bears few if any traces of the Reich repetition style, but there was an overlap both of performing forces — the strings of the Britten Sinfonia under Clark Rundell providing the curiously specialised accompaniment to MacMillan’s Clemency and participating in Reich’s You Are (Variations) — and of thematic preoccupation. MacMillan’s one-acter, to a text by Michael Symmons Roberts, centres on the angelic announcement in the Book of Genesis to Abraham’s aged wife, Sarah, that she will bear a son; this comes up, too, in Reich’s video opera The Cave, extracts from which were given by the Kronos Quartet at the Barbican. The place was crammed with two days of events from 11am to 11pm, a reminder of the “total immersion weekends” the BBC Symphony Orchestra (a participant in Reverberations) used to mount here — 2005’s was devoted, indeed, to MacMillan.

Among the significant influences on MacMillan’s music, Britten stands high, and Clemency’s economical (50-minute) treatment of a slice of scripture, its casting for just five voices, four of them male, and its quasi-ritualistic manner of proceeding — as staged by Katie Mitchell, there is a long, silent preamble — evoke the Britten of the church parables. Similarly, MacMillan’s restlessly inventive string-writing — biting, resonant, athletic, but with an expressionistic edge — sometimes brought to mind Britten’s Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge, and certainly sounded terrific in the Linbury pit acoustic. Beyond the Brittenish tonality there is a wealth of folkish inflection to the string and vocal parts alike: the music begins with a long, cantillating solo prayer for Abraham — the baritone Grant Doyle singing with exemplary diction here, as throughout — and later the strings have an interludial monody of similar cast.

Using strings by themselves in an opera is an original stroke — it made me feel something special was in store. Seductive, too, was the mise en scène. Inspired by Andrei Rublev’s icon of the Hospitality of Abraham, the set, by Alex Eales, is a giant altarpiece triptych, each gold frame disclosing a room in Abraham’s croft-like (though contemporary) dwelling. I’ve hardly seen the modular space of the Linbury put to such beautiful use, or fitted with what is effectively a proscenium arch; and the production (free from surtitles) is captivating purely as tableaux.

James MacMillan's restlessly inventive string-writing certainly sounded terrific in the Linbury pit acoustic
As drama, it is concisely achieved, but not as single-minded as a Britten parable would be. Though Clemency (commissioned by the Royal Opera, Scottish Opera, Britten Sinfonia and Boston Lyric Opera) follows MacMillan’s oratorio-like Quickening (1998) and operatic scena Parthenogenesis (2000) — both scripted by Roberts — in its concern with birth and virgin birth, it has a second, increasingly dominant focus on those angelic announcers, called “Triplets” in the libretto. Appearing first as migrant workers and receiving Abraham’s generous hospitality, they inform an incredulous Sarah of her miracle pregnancy, but then wear suits and holsters in order to address themselves to the moral corruption of the neighbouring “twin towns”, not named as Sodom and Gomorrah, slated for destruction.
Abraham, appalled, seeks the titular clemency from them, asking if they would spare the towns should “50 acts of selflessness” be found in them, and when they say they would he tries to barter them down. He only has an ambiguous success, and the opera ends with Sarah’s second aria, foreboding where her first had been hopeful.

The soprano Janis Kelly delivered these powerfully, and the tenors Eamonn Mulhall and Andrew Tortise with the baritone Adam Green, always singing as an entwined trio and often in an “early music” mode, were vocally intriguing. But a portentous note creeps in; the strings become all too slicingly assertive; and I felt by the end that the work is torn between being a kind of miracle play and a “relevant” political statement.

Clemency - Times Review by Neil Fisher

Clemency at the Linbury Studio, ROH

Neil Fisher

In the strange book of Genesis, it is one of the stranger moments, particularly for its brevity. Abraham’s aged wife Sarah finds out from three messengers from God that she will miraculously bear a child. With little time to absorb this wondrous news, the angels also have something less inspiring to say: they are en route to Sodom and Gomorrah and intend to destroy both cities, sparing none of their inhabitants.

It is fertile ground for this, James MacMillan’s third collaboration with the writer Michael Symmons Roberts and the director Katie Mitchell. It is also their second work, after the Linbury staging of Parthenogenesis in 2009, to explore biblical questions in a modern context, using the Brittenesque format of chamber opera, or even staged parable.

Clemency certainly provides plenty of dramatic heat. “Think of us as travellers,” sing the three angels, here known as the Triplets. “But you look like murderers,” snaps back Grant Doyle’s grizzled Abraham, while Janis Kelly’s wary, weary Sarah gets a knife ready for her unknown guests — just in case — as well as a quickly tossed salad. When the three visitors reveal their murderous plans (using evidence of atrocities from their cameraphones), they don gangstersuits and snap guns out of their briefcases. Are they really divine, or just self-appointed vigilantes?

The question is a subtle one, though MacMillan’s souped-up score and Roberts’s sometimes opaque and under-enunciated text takes it into odd territory. His current musical style, familiar to those who both loved and loathed his St John Passion, is to alternate moments of seraphic beauty — in this case the Triplets, who sing in close-harmony unison — with jagged vocal lines, sudden crunchy chords (Clemency is set for strings only, here the excellent Britten Sinfonia under Clark Rundell) and wailing melismas.

It’s a formula that can drive Mitchell’s contemporary setting, beautifully evoked in Alex Eales’s three-panelled set, towards something more contrived. And in 50 packed minutes it feels like the balance between scene-setting and action has gone askew. But the performances are hugely committed and the show is thrillingly tight. You certainly won’t be bored.

Clemency - The Stage Review

by Edward Bhesania

Playing out within the frames of Alex Eales’s giant hinged triptych, James MacMillan’s latest operatic collaboration with poet Michael Symmons Roberts is a contemporary retelling of the Old Testament story of the hospitality of Abraham and Sarah - a childless elderly couple who take in three angels on their way to unleashing God’s judgement upon the sinful nearby towns of Sodom and Gomorrah.

Though operating entirely as a single entity - whether in burnished close-harmony or flourishing Renaissance-style polyphony - the present-day trio (Andrew Tortise, Eamon Mulhall and Adam Green) creates deep-rooted unease through the uncertainty of its objectives. Are these ‘Triplets’ really archangels carrying out God’s work, or fundamentalists bent on destroying their enemies? The trio’s furtive glances and their ritualistic changing from manual workers’ clothes into suits (concealing gun holsters) before leaving for their ‘mission’ suggests one thing - the atrocities they claim to want to halt in the neighbouring towns suggest another.

The trio’s fervent, penetrating intensity is matched by the string players of the Britten Sinfonia - a highly motivated army of generals under the lucid direction of Clark Rundell.

Amid all the searing drama it’s easy to overlook the figures of Abraham and Sarah. Director Katie Mitchell (who also worked on MacMillan’s recent The Sacrifice for Welsh National Opera) succeeds in beautifully and delicately conveying their mutual respect, while Grant Doyle sings Abraham with a pure, uncomplicated richness one could happily listen to all night and Janis Kelly perceptively reflects the burden of Sarah’s longstanding sterility seemingly as much by what is thought as what is sung. Equally powerful in narrative and in musical terms, this work seems to have hit the ground running.

Clemency - Independent Review

Clemency, Royal Opera House, London 

(Rated 5/ 5 )

Reviewed by Jessica Duchen

Less is more: in James MacMillan's music, every note counts. And never more so than in Clemency, the Scottish composer's brand-new chamber opera, which packs questions powerful, emotional, philosophical and religious into just 45 minutes. With his regular librettist Michael Symmons Roberts and the director Katie Mitchell, MacMillan has created a terrifically intense, focused and inspired musical work on a thought-provoking parable, updated to the present day.

Sarah and Abraham, a dowdy middle-aged couple in a run-down apartment, offer hospitality to three men apparently in need of shelter. But the strangers are angels: they bring a divine message that Sarah, despite her age, will soon bear a son. Then, though, they change into suits, concealing guns. Their mission is to take revenge on two towns that have treated outsiders with cruelty. Abraham argues for clemency. The ethics of "collective punishment" are never far away.

Mitchell's staging and the excellent designs by Alex Eales present this fable in a tripartite frame that suggests an altarpiece, while remaining naturalistic behind it. First, for several music-less minutes, Sarah cooks, birds sing, planes pass overhead. Abraham, alone at prayer, sings long phrases with quasi-Middle Eastern ornamentation. But the characterisation is unfailing: Sarah, sung by the marvellous Janis Kelly, has soaring, palpitating and plunging lines as her emotions are buffeted by fear and elation. Abraham, the full-toned Grant Doyle, is straightforward, humble but tenacious. The "triplets" are heard first in close harmony, almost as if with one voice at three pitches: an otherworldly sound, performed with frightening power by Adam Green, Eamonn Mulhall and Andrew Tortise.

But there's another character: the orchestra – the strings of the Britten Sinfonia, conducted by Clark Rundell. They play as if possessed in instrumental episodes that seem to argue the points, amplify the emotions and ratchet up the tension. These passages structure the score just as the three-part picture-frame structures the staging.

The end, though, seemed rather abrupt. In the ensuing long silence, we waited and hoped for a few extra concluding minutes.

Original review link here

Clemency - Telegraph Review

James MacMillan's new one-act libretto is subtly haunting and quietly powerful

Rating: * * * *

By Rupert Christiansen

Drawn loosely from a story in Genesis and perhaps also inspired by Britten’s church parables, Clemency is a new one-act opera by the Catholic composer James MacMillan, working for the third time with the librettist Michael Symmons Roberts and director Katie Mitchell. Subtly haunting and quietly powerful, it is a parable of God’s will in the world, its precise significance left opaque.

Abraham and Sarah are presented as a middle-aged childless couple living in honest poverty – as so often in Mitchell’s work, the resonance suggest the Balkans during the wars of the 1990s. Three unknown young men, dressed in military fatigues, appear at their door. Abraham and Sarah show them hospitality, for which they are grateful.

They tell Sarah that, although she is past the age of child-bearing, she will bear a son. Abraham and Sarah are sceptical of the men’s right to speak for God, but the men explain that they have come to wreak divine vengeance on the “twin towns” nearby. Angels or terrorists (or both), they change into dark suits, produce weaponry and prepare to fulfil their mission.

Abraham cannot believe the stories they tell of the wickedness which pervades the towns. He begs for clemency. Find “50 acts of selflessness” among the inhabitants, he says, and relent. The men agree, and Abraham continues to bargain – find 40, 30, 10 and spare them, he implores.

But they will not meet Abraham’s final plea that one good deed will bring salvation. Sarah is left contemplating the birth of a longed-for son, but wonders what sort of world he will inherit. The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away; blessed be the name of the Lord. The pace is slow but sure, the idiom harmonically intense, the mood bleak, solemn and impassioned, often evoking threnodic Orthodox chant.

Otherwise, there are no fancy effects or percussive extravagances, the sense of spiritual austerity being underpinned by an orchestra of strings alone. The Britten Sinfonia plays with total assurance under Clark Rundell. Mitchell and her designer Alex Eales set the drama on a stage divided into a gold-framed triptych of three rooms.

Grant Doyle and Janis Kelly as Abraham and Sarah and Eamonn Mulhall, Andrew Tortise and baritone Adam Green as the mysterious visitors make up an ideal cast.

This is an opera which leaves a lasting effect, and I want to hear it again soon.

Original review link here

Clemency - New Statesman Review

Fleeting visions

by Alexandra Coghlan

 

James MacMillan's latest chamber opera is difficult to pin down.

Our English word "guest" derives from the Greek "xenos". It's a word whose historical and etymological tensions are hidden in its interchangeable meanings of guest, host and stranger. It is the friction inherent to this idea of hospitality, of the unstable relationship of power, otherness and duty between host and guest, that animates James MacMillan's latest chamber opera Clemency.

Following where 2000's Parthenogenesis led, Clemency is strongly informed by the composer's Roman Catholic faith, an affiliation shared with Michael Symmons Roberts, librettist for both works. Taking that most inscrutable of Genesis stories, The Hospitality of Abraham (most familiar from Andrei Rublev's fifteenth-century icon of the same name), as its root, MacMillan cultivates the tale into a contemporary social fable. Complicating the sins of Sodom and Gomorrah through their pointed rechristening as the "twin towns", Macmillan's oblique parable stretches beyond morality into the realm of contemporary politics.

Scored for five singers and string orchestra, Clemency's brisk 50 minutes chart the intrusion of three strangers into the quiet domesticity of the aged Abraham and Sarah. Welcomed and fed, the strangers foretell that when they return in a year Sarah will have had a son, and the couple recognise them as angels. Learning of their plans to destroy neighbouring towns, Abraham pleads with them for mercy, eventually extracting a promise that if just five good men are found the towns will be spared.

Framing the action within a gilt-edged triptych, Alex Eales' set anchors the opera in the symbolic, two-dimensional world of religious iconography. This flattened perspective (mirrored physically in some clever spatial use of the three panelled stage sections) chafes fruitfully against the detailed naturalism of the sets and Katie Mitchell's direction, giving weight to their grubby contemporary banality.

While MacMillan is perhaps best-known for his Celtic-inflected choral works, his operatic writing has proved itself altogether tougher and more flexible. After the lyric abrasions of Parthenogenesis it was hard to be satisfied with Clemency's uneasy mix of pastiche Eastern Orthodoxy (with MacMillan's signature Lombardic ornaments reinvented as Klezmer-style embellishments) and sub-Vaughan Williams string effects.

The same mewling violin cries that pleaded so eloquently in the opening of The Confession of Isobel Gowdie here lost any emotional referent, and while much of the string writing had a muscular brilliance about it, its coherence was lost in the Babel of harmonic languages. Quite literally out of tune with their earthly surroundings, the music of the Triplets (strongly sung by Adam Green, Eamonn Mulhall, Andrew Tortise) established its own modal sound-world, the three-voices-in-one presenting a striking musical Trinity. Only the occasional unisons were marred by the challenge of blending three such different vocal tones.

Grant Doyle led the cast as Abraham in a beautifully-judged piece of singing that brought authority without bombast to some of MacMillan's loveliest writing. The delicacy of his performance was matched by Janis Kelly's life-worn Sarah, whose quiet presence only fully surrendered to song in the rather ambiguous ending.
Having the strings of the Britten Sinfonia (efficiently conducted by Clark Rundell) as orchestra was a piece of luxury casting by no means fully exploited by the deeply sunken pit. Given the Linbury's almost endlessly flexible setup, perhaps a more prominent position could usefully have been found for them, mirroring the instrumental prominence MacMillan's music demands and achieving more direct interplay with the singers.
While MacMillan's orchestral and choral works establish a sound-world on their own terms, giving the composer one of the most recognisable voices of contemporary British music, this has not always been true of his operas. Caught up in the moment-to-moment reflection of the libretto's images, he can forget to ground the music in a self-sufficient framework or language, leaving it curiously vulnerable and elusive. With Symmons Roberts' inscrutable text our sole concordance here, MacMillan's biblical vision failed to make itself understood, barring us from interpretation even as the spread wings of the triptych invited us in.

Original review link here

Clemency - FT Review

Clemency, Linbury Studio Theatre, London

By Andrew Clark

Grant Doyle as Abraham

James MacMillan completed his new chamber opera long before the US sent a group of commandos to neutralise Osama bin Laden – and yet his adaptation of an Old Testament tale could hardly have been better calculated to raise questions about the raid’s moral validity.
Three mysterious men arrive at the home of Abraham and Sarah, who offer them hospitality. The men are either angels on a mission to administer God’s justice to a nearby community or terrorists bent on violence. Abraham asks them to show clemency towards the “good”.

The piece is loaded with all sorts of knotty questions. Who is good and who is bad, and who are we to judge? Is revenge sufficient reason for summary justice? Can violence ever be justified, even when ordered by an Old Testament God?

Clemency was premiered by ROH2, the Royal Opera House’s fig leaf for small-scale creativity. The piece really belongs in church, for Michael Symmons Roberts’ libretto is too bluntly moralistic to be taken seriously in an opera house. MacMillan’s score, ranging across quasi-Orthodox chant, lyrical reflection and passages of extreme tension, never lets us see Abraham and Sarah as anything other than symbols.

But at 50 minutes Clemency does not overstay its welcome. The instrumental accompaniment could best be described as a concerto for string orchestra, with techniques lifted from Vaughan Williams and Tippett. It is equally indebted to Hungarian folk music. All this enhances MacMillan’s reputation as a skilled musical magpie.

Katie Mitchell’s staging, conducted by Clark Rundell, is sensitive to the work’s ambiguities. Its biggest asset is Alex Eales’s three-room set, built like a gilt-framed altar. Janis Kelly and Grant Doyle give meaning to their every movement, while the so-called “Triplets” – Adam Green, Eamonn Mulhall and Andrew Tortise – blend together well.

 

Original Review link here.

Clemency – Guardian Review

by Tim Ashley
Sunday 8 May 2011 18.00 BST

Adam Green, Eamonn Mulhall and Andrew Tortise
Photograph: Tristram Kenton

Clemency, James MacMillan's new opera for five singers and string orchestra, is about "vengeance and mercy", according to its librettist, Michael Symmons Roberts. A co-production between ROH2 and Scottish Opera, it's a religious work that examines the inscrutable nature of divine justice by recasting part of the book of Genesis in contemporary terms.

Abraham offers hospitality to three mysterious, angelic Triplets, who prophesy that his wife Sarah, who is ageing and childless, will have a son within a year. The Triplets are also bent, however, on the vengeful destruction of the "twin towns" that stand nearby. Abraham is soon pleading with them, in vain, to spare the towns if they can be found to contain five people who are "good in heart and mind".

There are problems with some of this. The words "twin towns", with their overtones of twin towers, raise provocative implications of terrorism, though the programme notes tell us that some sort of vigilante action is what is intended. The towns, meanwhile, are a latter-day Sodom and Gomorrah: distancing themselves from a narrative responsible for centuries of homophobia, MacMillan and Symmons Roberts reimagine them as the centre of a dictatorship predicated on torture and injustice.

The text is opaque, at times esoteric. Symmons Roberts indulges in overload: "My destiny is played out on its wall of pearl" is a typical line. Parts of it are in what I took to be Hebrew and/or Aramaic, but we're offered no guidance as to their meaning. The score, however, has some attractive moments, though there's a bit too much consciously ecstatic string writing in the tradition of Tippett's Fantasia Concertante on a Theme of Corelli. Sarah has a striking central aria. The Triplets sing in close harmony that broadens into suave polyphony with overtones of Palestrina.

It's well done. There's shapely playing from the Britten Sinfonia under Clark Rundell. Janis Kelly registers Sarah's "gratitude and terror" towards God in a performance of considerable power. Grant Doyle is her bewildered, angry Abraham, while Adam Green, Eamonn Mulhall and Andrew Tortise are curiously seductive as the Triplets.

Katie Mitchell's modern-dress production contains the action in a framed three-part set that resembles a triptych, and ingeniously offers multiple perspectives on the same series of rooms. There are some clever touches, with the Triplets arriving dressed as workmen, but departing for Sodom in suits, Reservoir Dogs-style. Mitchell wisely plays most of it straight, though: some of it is simply too dense to warrant interpretative interference.

Original review link here.

Clemency - What's On Stage Review

by Mark Valencia

The gates of a great triptych stand open, but no painted icons lie within. Instead, each panel contains a fragment of a house: one shows part of a kitchen, the others a bare living room seen from two different perspectives. It is modern but dilapidated. The branch of a tree has shattered the window and grown indoors, a reminder of the permanence of nature in a transient human world. For James McMillan’s new operatic treatment of an Old Testament tale, these designs by Alex Eales provide a striking collision of ancient and modern - an early promise that is not fulfilled by the opera itself despite the presence of five excellent soloists and the commanding advocacy of Clark Rundell and the Britten Sinfonia strings.

Chapter 18 of the Book of Genesis relates a slender fable in which Abraham and his wife, Sarah, are visted by three angels to whom they offer hospitality, and who in turn foretell that within a year Sarah will have a child. The angels prepare to leave, letting slip that they are on their way to trash the nearby towns of Sodom and Gomorrah. Abraham persuades the celestial trio to spare them if they can find ten good people living there.

I do hope it’s by accident, not design, that the libretto by Michael Symmons Roberts refers to Sodom and Gomorrah not by name but as ‘the twin towns’, and that careless diction alone causes the word ‘towns’ to sound so much like ‘towers’; but since the opera recasts the story in an amorphous modern setting (we could be anywhere from Latvia to Libya) I fear the glib worst. If Clemency has a moral message it is a confusing one: the three angels are depicted as migrant black-economy workers who morph into gun-hungry gangsters out for mayhem, yet good old Abraham softens their hearts with the most childlike of reasoning.

McMillan has scored his opera for strings alone, and it is a disappointment. One does not anticipate pastiche from a composer who, twenty years ago, showed such originality in works like The Confession of Isobel Gowdie and the stunning Seven Last Words from the Cross, yet for stretches here the string writing is an uneasy mishmash of Klezmer, Vaughan Williams and rehashed McMillan. True, some of the innovative string effects are ear-popping, as is often the way with this technically prodigious composer, but on first hearing at least the musical value of Clemency appears uncharacteristically slight.

Grant Doyle’s Abraham has vocal clarity and physical composure, and Janis Kelly brings a careworn dignity to the under-written role of his wife, Sarah. The three angels (‘Triplets’) are very well played by Adam Green, Eamonn Mulhall and Andrew Tortise as a closely harmonised trio whose music recalls Britten’s Canticle IV, The Journey of the Magi.

As a theatre director, Katie Mitchell is unsurpassed in the psychological acuity of her characterisation; but although she brings her customary skill to staging this 45-minute piece, she never quite probes to its heart. Perhaps it doesn’t have one.

Original review link here.

Clemency - Classical Source Review

ROH2 – Clemency

Peter Reed | Saturday, May 07, 2011

With the same sort of Christian provenance that generated “Parthenogenesis” (centred round an unnatural/miraculous birth), James MacMillan and his librettist Michael Symmons Roberts have turned to another miraculous delivery in their chamber opera “Clemency”. The story comes from the book of Genesis (chapter 18) in which three angels (referred to as Triplets in the cast list) tell the elderly (post-menopausal) Sarah, wife of the patriarch Abraham, that she will give birth to a son (Isaac) – the key event in the establishment of the tribes of Israel. It’s a long-distance Annunciation, which can be interpreted as an anticipation of the birth of Christ. The legend – a remarkable piece of writing – doesn’t stop there, though.

The three angels have also been sent to sort out the “twin towns” of sin, Sodom and Gomorrah, and there is a strange, shaggy-dog-style passage in which Abraham tries to strike a bargain to spare those good, blameless townsfolk, however few of them there are – an early precedent of human intercession with a vengeful Almighty. In a contemporary twist, the three angels are messengers of retribution who refer to the “twin towns” of depravation in a similar way as terrorists referred to the “twin towers” of a corrupt city, to be punished with annihilation. Miraculous birth, pleas for mercy and terrorist angels hell-bent on jihad – a tall order for an opera that lasts about 50 minutes, the first five of which were played in total silence, supposedly establishing the quiet ease of Abraham and Sarah’s marriage but rather raising anxieties about a possible technical fault.

Katie Mitchell’s production is contemporary miserabilist – gritty, you might call it; Alex Eales’s set was like a hinged altar triptych, so that whatever was going on in each frame was presented as a picture, and dignified with a timeless quality. On the evidence of “Parthenogenesis”, MacMillan and Roberts are very good at folding in any numbers of layers into their work and letting them find their own resonance. In “Clemency”, though, much of the libretto was lost in the singing – Abraham had a long opening solo, supposedly in made-up Aramaic, and apparently there were other passages in cod-Latin , but much of it could have been in double-Dutch for all you could make out the words. MacMillan has scored it for string orchestra, and that sound comes packed with particularly English, pastoral associations. Apart from some obviously Arabian Nights-style emblematic inflections, the music had the powerful flavour of Vaughan Williams or Tippett in assertively mystic/ecstatic mode. MacMillan is a fine writer for voices and a vivid reactor to words and images, but I have still to discern an unmistakable style.

Grant Doyle was a powerful vocal and stage presence, and breezed through the demands the music made of him. Janis Kelly was a formidable Sarah (as indeed Sarah is in the Bible - she was quite a matriarchal handful) and delivered a sympathetic and dramatic performance. The two-tenors, one-baritone trio of angels were vividly realised and chillingly evoked the power of blind faith. Clark Rundell conducted with a feel for the score’s immediacy, and there are some fine players in the Britten Sinfonia.

Original review link here