Having missed The Minotaur at Covent Garden, I watched it on TV yesterday - yes, BBC2 actually decided to show an entire brand-new opera by Birtwistle from the Royal Opera House on Saturday night at prime time (so full marks for that).
I ended up hiding behind the sofa. Honest to goodness, guv, I haven't seen anything so scary since the Daleks, or anything so horrific since Downfall.
Of course, it was fantastic - amazing singing and great performances from everyone and especially John Tomlinson and Christine Rice, huge power in the music even if it's tough on the ears and brain (I liked the use of the cimbalom), and the libretto is very striking indeed. I was just relieved not to have been locked into a Bayreuth-style pew for the duration and I really don't think they should have shown it before the watershed.
Could someone over the Pond please tell us something: are Birtwistle's operas performed much in the States, and how do they go over? Ditto for Germany, France and Italy?
3 comments:
I doubt anybody outside of a conservatoire has heard of Birtwhistle in Italy. They only discovered Peter Grimes ten years ago. Contemporary music and non-Italian opera aren't very popular over there. I've actually never heard of a performance of Birtwhistle in Italy.
N.
Well, the Italians are in luck! Milan and Turin are going to be awash in Birtwistle come the fall. His opera The Last Supper is fantastic, lots of meaty choral writing in his later, more lyrical vein. I love his pieces Night's Black Bird and Shadow of Night too, he's one of my very favorite composers. One of the highlights of my concert-going life was hearing Simon Rattle conduct the CBSO in his glorious Earth Dances at Symphony Hall in the late 90's.
I don't think any of his operas have ever been performed in the United States, unless Punch and Judy was done way back when (likely at a university). His opera The Second Mrs. Kong is one of my Deserted Island operas and I'll travel anywhere in the world if it's every produced again. His orchestral and especially chamber stuff is played on the Continent a fair bit.
Hopefully, the BBC television relay of The Minotaur will come out on DVD at some point. I have a recording of the audio and I really like it a lot; very violent, of course, but hey, that's Birtwistle. Apparently, due to the smart ROH policy of lowering the prices to merely damned pricey, the entire run was packed out; they'll make it up with 4,000 La Traviata's they had scheduled, I'd imagine.
In the US? Not so much. I suspect they MUST have appeared as curiosities from time to time (perhaps in academic institutions? Indiana? MSM?), but in my experience the name "Birtwhistle" is unfamiliar to most outside US academic and compositional circles. Tippett and Walton don't get much more attention, although works by those composers do appear *more* often (in other words "occasionally" rather than "never"). For the record, a search on operabase.com only pulled up UK Birtwistle performances.
That said, the converse is somewhat true (if not as much so): I know that Menotti, Robert Ward and Floyd are performed quite regularly in the US, and not so much in the UK. Swings in roundabouts, I guess!
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