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Tom Sutcliffe acclaims a dual triumph for
composer Param Vir at the Munich Biennale
Flamboyant strings

Opera

BY TOM SUTCLIFFE

 

PARAM VIR’S two little operas, Broken Strings and Snatched by the Gods, were the real hits of Hans Werner Henze’s month-long music theatre festival in Munich. Staged by Pierre Audi in restrained, carefully focused productions, they were impressively cast and had the advantage of a prior Amsterdam try-out — an obvious help to conductor David Porcelijn’s refined musical interpretation.

Vir, who was born in Delhi in 1952 and moved to London eight years ago, uses a not-quite-tonal modern style that sits easily beside such typically English voices as Rupert Bawden, Simon Holt and Martin Butler. Vir’s elemental paeans and epiphanies, well-laced with percussion, are usually discursive and indulgent, splashing bursts of sound impressionistically around. But voice parts are firmly geared to the singable and intelligible, with the dramatic structure simply and convincingly ordered.

Vir has that born opera composers essential knack of imbuing character and a sense of narrative urgency into a few bars or turns of phrase. Such welcome skills need a worthwhile theme to serve, and Vir has, remarkably, found two separate librettists who are well up to the mark.

It’s no surprise that David Rudkin’s text for Broken Strings is so good: Rudkin is a writer with a distinct poetic flair and love of metaphor. Broken Strings is a Buddhist backstage drama outlining a profound religious conundrum. A king commands entertainment, and the new play offered to him shows Musil auditioning for the post of court musician, competing against his old teacher Guttil — a barely recognisable, comically doddery Richard Suart — whose strings break one after another as the audition before three judges proceeds. Yet as Guttil seems more and more handicapped by the collapse of his instrument, he pleases the judges more and more. In some mysterious way, technological decline releases art. Musil, dashingly portrayed by Christopher Gillett, decides to break his own strings and do the same trick, but no sound emerges.

The king (who has scarcely sung a note so far) stops the play, scatters the company, and draws his own conclusions in a haunting, closing aria. Must he be broken too? Did the strings obstruct the song? “Ever with less, the old man said. Must less sustain me too? Till I make whatever song is mine . . . from nothing?” Vir’s melodic writing for this final passage, the object of the whole opera, is both touching and memorable — and was sung with refulgent nobility by Charles Van Tassel.

But it’s not just the inspiring end that impresses. The music all the way through is wonderfully imaginative. Musil’s flamboyance is displayed with extravagant orchestral flourishes that transmute a neo-Indian extension of decorative melody into contemporary western musical excess.

Guttil’s handicapped efforts lead to the entry of highly symbolic Buddhist creatures: elephant, fish and peacock equipped with beautifully expressive musical lines, and colourful costumes and masks designed by Chloe Obolensky — marvellous half-comic opportunities for mezzo Nuala Willis, coloratura Manon Heijne and tenor Kenn Chester. Vir’s timing is immaculate, and Audi’s staging was exactly judged for the material. This piece will surely travel far.

William Radice's text for Snatched by the Gods is adapted from Tagore, describing a band of pilgrims on their way by boat to a Hindu bathing festival at the mouth of the Ganges. Moksada’s neglected young son Rakhal wants to go too, and tries to stow away. His mother lets him come along with the words: “All right! The sea can have you.” On the way back, the pilgrims and boatman, caught in a dangerous storm, remember Moksada’s phrase and conclude the gods are keeping her to her word. Maitra, in charge of the trip, tries to save the boy, who has been cast into the water, by jumping in himself; but he also drowns.

Audi used a hanging platform that sways about the stage, shiplike, only to isolate the boy Rakhal and his mother. A few naturalistic snapshots of sunset and sunrise created with warm low-angled lighting from the side added an atmosphere of dubious hope. The burden of the drama was placed on the acting of the principal performers: Michael Lewis as Maitra, Cynthia Buchan as Rakhal’s aunt Annada, and Katherine Ciesinski as Moksada, whose passionately glowing performance was the pivot of the whole interpretation.
Audi’s ritualistic approach made the work rather reminiscent of Britten’s church parables, but the music is far dirtier and more energetic. This was a more conventional opera than Broken Strings — almost Puccini-style verismo in dramatic approach. Intense, sombre and popular.