The first staged production of composer Gerald Barry's TV opera The Triumph of Beauty and Deceit makes an edge-of-the-seat experience out of a strange, hyperbolic allegory, writes Michael Dervan
The history of television opera - that is, opera specifically written for television - is one of migration. If the work is successful, it's more than likely to make its way into the opera house rather than continue to be celebrated on TV. Gerald Barry's The Triumph of Beauty and Deceit was a Channel 4 commission, written to fill a broadcast hour, and originally screened in 1994. It made it onto CD four years ago, and it has taken just another four to reach the stage, opening the Aldeburgh Festival last Friday. There will be further performances at the Almeida Opera Festival in London later this month and at the Berliner Festwochen in September.
Fifty-minute operas are notoriously difficult to programme, but the solution to finding a companion piece for the Barry seems to have been an easy one. As was the case with his first opera, The Intelligence Park, the composer's inspiration came from the 18th century. He learnt of the Channel 4 project just days before the closing date for applications, and found his imagination fired by Handel's oratorio The Triumph of Time and Truth. Staged excerpts from the 1737, Italian version of this work (Il trionfo del Tempo e del Disinganno) provided the first half of Nigel Lowery's Aldeburgh production.
It's typical of Barry's quirky transformational thinking that, with an all-male cast playing Truth, Pleasure, Beauty, Deceit and Time, he should have come up with Beauty and Deceit as the triumphant pairing - similar and usually even more surprising outcomes result when he transforms other composers' material in the processes of composition.
His vocal writing is notorious for its fractured, often surreal quality.
In The Triumph of Beauty and Deceit voices fly with abandon to and from the extremities of their range, hitting the barriers with elastic energy, stretching and compressing words with manic irrepressibility, and shifting occasionally into a lagoon-like calm where simpler lines momentarily hold sensual sway. The 15-player ensemble powers along with Barry's typical relentless drive, motoric but with trademark glitch-like irregularities and discontinuities.
In truth, it all seems like a combination most unlikely to succeed in performance. Meredith Oakes's self-consciously archaic libretto is a pretty chewy text, unlikely to transmit well in performance after Barry has had his way with it, and the energy levels of the music present serious challenges for visual counterparting.
Surtitles provide a ready solution to the issue of unravelling the text, and the production by Nigel Lowery (who's responsible for design as well as direction) matches the helter-skelter momentum of the squabbling tug of war between virtue, vice and the ravaging depredations of time.
The set presents a curved building like a two-headed monster, a church entrance at one end, a garishly-lit house of pleasure at the other. The costumes range from Andrew Watts's Pleasure, looking as if he'd strayed off the set of the Rocky Horror Picture Show, and Roderick Williams's Deceit, in a tight, white, shiny vinyl skirt, to Stephen Richardson's stick-toting, storybook Old Father Time. The more sober presences are William Purefoy's cassocked Truth and Christopher Lemmings's bemused and abused Beauty.
The cast perform so strongly that it would be invidious to single any individual out. Lowery's production, with sometimes gut-wrenching explicitness, makes an edge-of-the-seat experience out of what's really a strange, hyperbolic allegory. Ambiguity abounds, and yet the centre somehow holds, not least because Thomas Adès, the festival's artistic director, conducts with such unflagging zest, to which the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group responds in kind.
Barry, who celebrated his 50th birthday earlier this year, is a featured composer at this year's Aldeburgh Festival, as he will be in November at the Huddersfield Festival. Aldeburgh will feature performances of his God Save the Queen (commissioned for the 50th anniversary of the Royal Festival Hall and set for children's choir and ensemble) and Chevaux-de-frise by the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra under Adès, and Diner from the Britten-Pears Orchestra under Sakari Oramo.
The festival's first weekend also included a performance at the Maltings in Snape - now the festival's main venue - of Barry's 1992 Piano Quartet by the Leopold String Trio with Noriko Kawai (piano). This piece, with its giddy, Irish flavour (another of Barry's distinctive transformations) was played with fine control and balance, but in a way that somehow limited the characteristic rhythmic tilt of its faster passages.
You can take it for granted that a piano quartet by Barry will have little to do with the tried and tested formulas of the genre. And the same can be said of the new Piano Quintet by Alexander Goehr, which was premièred in Aldeburgh Church by the Brodsky String Quartet impressively partnered by the young pianist Tom Poster. Goehr writes airy, flowing contrapuntal lines that hover like kite-tails in the air, and mostly keeps the piano well away from the empowerment and potential thunder of the bass region. It's an intriguing if perhaps overlong re-appraisal of a genre that had its peak in the romantic heart of the 19th century.
Pianist Imogen Cooper, who partnered the Leopold String Trio in a hand-in-glove account of the Schumann Piano Quartet, also gave a beautifully structured solo recital of Janáacek's In the Mist, Beethoven's Sonata in D, Op. 10 No. 3, and Schumann's Sonata in F sharp minor, Op 11. Schumann's piano sonatas are undergoing something of a revival at the moment - András Schiff and Evgeny Kissin are among the players who've taken some of them up.
Cooper showed a warm sensitivity in Op. 11, but not always the imaginative spark to carry Schumann's flights of fancy to their true goal. Her best playing was found in the opening Janácek, where she found the right poignant delicacy and weighted the music's harmonic shifts with consistently rewarding care.
Gerald Barry's The Triumph of Beauty and Deceit has four performances at Almeida Opera in London between June 27th and July 4th (0044 20 7359 4404) and two at the Berliner Festwochen on September 15th and 16th (0049 30 25489 100). The Aldeburgh Festival continues until June 22nd (0044 1728 687100)
