1. Lessons in Love and Violence		1:31:16

Stéphane Degout - King
Barbara Hannigan - Isabel
Gyula Orendt - Gaveston/Stranger
Peter Hoare - Mortimer
Samuel Boden - Boy/Young King
Jennifer France - Witness 1/Singer 1/Woman 1
Krisztina Szabó - Witness 2/Singer 2/Woman 2
Andri Björn Robertsson - Witness 3/Madman

Orchestra of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden
George Benjamin - Conductor, Composer

May 26, 2018, Royal Opera House, Covent Garden

There are no two ways about it: Lessons in Love and Violence is a superb work. A seamless collaboration between composer George Benjamin, writer Martin Crimp, director Katie Mitchell and designer Vicki Mortimer, with a superlative cast (more on whom in a moment), this is a work that sends you out into the night not humming catchy tunes, but in a slight daze, as if you’ve just witnessed a prodigy and can’t yet fully comprehend it.

Sung in English, at an intense 100 minutes with no interval, Lessons in Love and Violence plunges you right into the turbulent world of England’s King Edward II, whose all-consuming love for another man, Gaveston, brings about his downfall.

The conflict is established from the very first words exchanged between Edward and his chief military expert, Mortimer. ‘It’s nothing to do with loving a man,’ Mortimer tells the king. ‘It’s love full stop that is poison.’

Love and politics don’t mix – thus the clash between personal and political comes alive. Blinded by love, the king will simply not see that the personal is political; that in his position private is always public.

Benjamin’s score creates a climate of inquietude from the very first notes that rise from the pit, where the Orchestra of the Royal Opera House, in fine form, is conducted by the composer himself.

Complex and multilayered, George Benjamin’s music possesses a lustrous sensuality and an uncanny ability to wrap itself around you like a second skin. Throughout it retains the ability to surprise you, with unexpected phrases of crystalline clarity for a single instrument occasionally arising from the orchestral bed. For this particular work, Benjamin has enlisted the sound of less familiar instruments, such as the metallic clang of the Hungarian cimbalom, or the eerie beats of West African talking drums. His harps, too, are required to produce not ethereal cascades, but lower, more ominous plucked notes.

What Benjamin’s music never does is muffle the text. Every word of Martin Crimp’s extraordinary text reaches our ears with searing clarity, making the surtitles rather redundant. The prolific playwright Martin Crimp is that rare thing: a man capable of writing an opera text in vernacular, plausible, spoken English.

Though the real Edward II ruled England in the early 14th century, this production transposes the action to the modern day. Vicki Mortimer’s sets make a bedroom a public space, where the constant presence of others – courtiers, ordinary people or Edward’s wife, Isabel, and children – underline the point that in this context the personal is always political.

The set, dominated by a huge, blue-lit tropical fish tank, rotates between scenes so that we look at the action from different points of view; in part 2, following the king’s downfall, the fish tank is empty, dark, desolate.

Totally attuned to Benjamin’s musical language, the entire cast give breathtaking interpretations. As the king, the French baritone Stéphane Degout, possesses a warm timbre that navigates the challenging tessitura of his role with profoundly affecting ease. The Hungarian-Romanian baritone Gyula Orendt is a fitting Gaveston: mysterious, equivocal, reckless.

Mortimer, the man who would usurp the King and turn love into tyranny, is sung with suitable perfidy by the British tenor Peter Hoare, overcoming a slightly nervy start quickly to acquire full command of his role.

The Canadian soprano Barbara Hannigan, last seen at Covent Garden in Benjamin’s previous opera, the international hit Written on Skin, is in luscious voice as Isabel, the spurned wife who plots with Mortimer to overthrow Edward and place her young son on the throne.

And the young British tenor Samuel Boden is the son, later to become the Young King, who subverts Mortimer’s plot and reestablishes order of sorts.

Katie Mitchell’s direction (she, too, a Benjamin veteran, having directed Written on Skin to great acclaim) is all you’d expect – assured, intelligent, and showing full understanding of the intentions of composer and writer.

Lessons in Love and Violence is probably THE operatic event of this season. It should not be missed. ---Teresa Guerreiro, culturewhisper.com

download (mp3 @320 kbs):

yandex mediafire uloz.to gett

back

1. Written on Skin		1:36:33

Barbara Hannigan (Agnès) 
Christopher Purves (The Protector)
Bejun Mehta (Angel 1 - The Boy) 
Rebecca Loeb (Angel 2 - Marie)british
Allan Clayton (Angel 3 - John)
Mahler Chamber Orchestra 
George Benjamin - composer, conductor

Grand Théâtre de Provence, Aix-en-Provence 

The premiere of George Benjamin’s 'Written on Skin’, inspired by 12th-century Occitan legend, was the haunting highlight of this year's Aix festival.

Despite its less-than-appealing title, George Benjamin’s important new opera Written on Skin is full of beautiful and haunting things. Anyone queasy at the prospect of the world’s first tattooing opera will be relieved to find that “skin” here alludes to medieval parchment, and that one of the three principal characters is an illuminator of manuscripts.

As it turns out, some genteel tattooing would be nothing compared to the violent denouement – involving a little light cannibalism, which may indeed be a first in opera – but the scenario certainly inspires Benjamin’s most vivid music to date, in a score embracing everything from sensuousness to explosive ferocity. Like the first, the Pied Piper-inspired Into the Little Hill (2006), it sets a text by the playwright Martin Crimp, who bases his libretto on the gruesome 12th-century Occitan legend of the troubadour Guillem de Cabestany.

In the postmodern twist Crimp and Benjamin give it, three contemporary angels bring the trio of medieval figures back to life. We see how a powerful landowner (called the Protector) commissions an artist (the Boy) to celebrate the achievements of his family, and how the Boy’s meticulous work attracts the admiration of the Protector’s young wife, Agnès.

He awakens the repressed passion of Agnès, who asserts herself as an independent woman rather than a possession of the Protector. But soon she unsuspectingly finds herself eating the Boy’s heart, served up by her murderous husband. She throws herself to her death. Crimp’s libretto is cleverly constructed in 15 scenes, perhaps too cleverly, at times, for there is something self-conscious about the protagonists’ use of the third person in their recounting of events. This, too, encourages the director Katie Mitchell to add her own layers of interpretation, not always helpful in such a finely wrought new work.

Her staging, though, is beautiful to look at. Vicki Mortimer’s multi-roomed, double-storey set is divided into “then” and “now”, lit in contrasting yellow and white by Jon Clark. The angels inhabit a space that resembles an archaeologists’ laboratory, but one room is never entered by anyone: doubtless all very meaningful, and in keeping with the slightly “distanced” effect of the piece.

Indeed, despite its English libretto the whole thing feels rather French, but then Benjamin, as well as being one of the leading British composers of our day, could aptly be described at the finest French composer since his teacher Messiaen; his colouristic imagination clearly comes from that tradition. Using a large orchestra sparingly and unleashing it only in the interludes, he conjures up glistening, mysterious sounds and never drowns his singers.

Conducting the premiere himself, Benjamin was rewarded with wonderful playing from the Mahler Chamber Orchestra and an outstanding cast. Weaving high, melismatic lines, the soprano Barbara Hannigan and countertenor Bejun Mehta capture the strange intensity of the piece, and Christopher Purves uses his warm, clear baritone to disturbing effect as an increasingly ogre-like Protector. Doubling on angelic duty, Mehta is joined by Rebecca Jo Loeb and Allan Clayton. ---John Allison, telegraph.co.uk

The premiere of Written on Skin was the operatic event of 2012, proof that opera can move contemporary audiences through its capacity – that might prove to be stronger than cinema – to adapt past subjects and the great motifs of our culture to present preoccupations. With Written on Skin, Martin Crimp and George Benjamin transfigure the medieval fabliau of the eaten heart as a parable of desire.

The traditional love triangle is somewhat shaped by experience through a dialogue which absorbs the narration, the breathtaking unfolding of the theme of illustration and the hypnotic dramatic ceremonial designed by Katie Mitchell. What glory does the lord of the place aspire to? What does the illuminator really intend to draw in his home? What recognition does the wife, Agnes, expect? What delicious dish can forever prevent her from eating? What is that skin on which the story is being written? For the first time in the history of opera, the driving force behind the drama is no other than women’s pleasure. ---opera-comique.com

download (mp3 @320 kbs):

yandex mediafire uloz.to gett

back