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THE SCOTSMAN - 19 February 1998

OPERA

Snatched by the Gods/Broken Strings
Theatre Royal, Glasgow

BY MARY MILLER

When Sir Peter Maxwell Davies first encountered Param Vir, his excitement was at discovering a font of melody - hardly, in the angular Eighties - a fashionable find. But Vir, as Max knew, is extraordinary, a sure and wonderfully cussed voice who pursues with unflinching courage all the musical routes which we, in the Nineties, with our minimalist emotions, are supposed to eschew: text laden with a profoundly human agenda, orchestration glistening with clarity, ideas which assault, as opposed to tease, the mind.

So hurrah for Scottish Opera for presenting Vir’s double bill, commissioned for the Munich Biennale in 1992. Snatched by the Gods though, is by no means an easily bewitching production. It tells the story of a widow who joins a band of pilgrims on a voyage in which her small son is a stowaway. She curses his stubbornness and when a storm threatens the ship, sees him sacrificed. But with Anthony McDonald’s direction, the story becomes lost among all the metaphor. As the music examines the characters’ dilemmas, the tale’s drama seems to leak away, leaving pauses weighty with interruption. So Rebecca de Pont-Davies appears an irritatingly fraught parent, Gwion Thomas, an unsure ship’s master. The boy, Thomas Dean, is beguiling – and the orchestral music, with a stunning bell-riven storm scene – proved hypnotic: exactly the point of Broken Strings to follow.

For this was astounding. It begins with Musil, the young virtuoso, being set aside in favour of Guttil, old and blind, whose instrument, as its strings break, produces more and more marvellous music. And here, McDonald’s clear and quirky style find focus with David Rudkin’s clever setting of story within story: the musicians and their jury play as though court entertainers – we and the King, though, will be changed by their tale.

There is both ravishing music and supreme wit. Three gorgeous creatures weave from Vir’s enchanting score – an elephant as lush and gracious as a rajah, a fish the stuff of fantasy (oh, to have a diamante dolphin as a headpiece) and a peacock (with iridescent dreadlocks). And the singing, to have this threesome breathe miracles, is superb, from Susan Gorton and Ann Archibald, although Alexander Anderson-Hall’s bird seemed strained. Guttil (Richard Lloyd Morgan) is moving, Musil (Stephen Rooke) elegantly miffed. The jury trio is also excellent.

If in Snatched the orchestra needs more characterisation and conductor Richard Farnes to feel the music’s punctuation as part of its forward flow, the playing in Broken Strings is beautiful, the cor anglais a burnished strand in a tapestry of smooth and supple threads.