Moksada and Rakhal in 'Snatched by the Gods', Netherlands Opera Production 1992
The Peacock from 'Broken Strings', Netherlands Opera Production 1992
OPERA, September 1996
Snatched by the Gods and Broken Strings
Almeida Opera at the Almeida Theatre, London, July 11
BY RODNEY MILNES
Param Vir’s two one-act operas were commissioned by and premiered at the Munich Biennale in 1992, where they won him the Best Composer prize. The same year they were also given in Amsterdam, whence Michael Davidson reported with enthusiasm on both the works and Pierre Audi’s productions (OPERA, September 1992, p. 1097). Well, four years later and better late than never, they have at last received their first British performances and added lustre to one of Almeida Opera’s best seasons yet.
Vir (born in Delhi in 1992) has been nurtured and encouraged by Maxwell Davies and Knussen and, as that would suggest, his musical language is neither confrontationally modernist nor neo-conservative: he knows his Britten and his Berg, he knows what works in the theatre. He also knows which instruments cover voices at what pitch and which don’t: one of the great pleasure of this double bill was being able to hear every word over luscious, exotically coloured instrumentation in a notoriously tricky acoustic – an acoustic tamed by Markus Stenz’s brilliant direction of the (by Almeida standards) massed bands of the London Sinfonietta ranged round the curved back wall with two banks of percussion in the circle.
Snatched by the Gods is to a libretto by William Radice based on a poem by Rabindranath Tagore. A boat carrying pilgrims to a Hindu festival is hit by a sudden storm; a child who joined the expedition is thought to have been cursed by his widowed mother and is sacrificed to the greater good. This chilling piece – a weird mixture of Curlew River and Der Jasager – is expertly laid out and paced over just 50 minutes. Strangely, the mother is denied the last word, but Susan Roberts suggested her instability cogently, and Ben De’Ath gave a touching performance as her initially cheerful, ultimately bemused child. Robert Poulton and Fiona Kimm gave powerful support.
Broken Strings, marginally longer and lighter in tone, is to a libretto by David Rudkin (with whom Vir is working on a new full-length opera) based on a Buddhist legend. An insufferably arrogant and priggish young virtuoso (a hint of Stravinsky in his music?) imagines he is unbeatable in a competition for court composer, but he loses to a clapped-out old player whose strings break one by one but who still conjures up sound visions of an Elephant (rhythm), a fish (harmony) and a peacock (melody). In frustration the virtuoso breaks his own strings – no sound emerges. A very nice parable! Stephen Rooke was mordantly funny as the virtuoso, Richard Suart suitably otherworldly as his rival. Nuala Willis (Elephant), Yvonne Barclay (Fish) and Wynne Evans (Peacock) wore Angela Davies’s exotic costumes to fine effect, and both works were unobtrusively but most skilfully directed by David Farr. Vir’s new piece is awaited with impatience – he is a born opera composer.