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