The Oxford Times has run a preview of our Garsington opera, Silver Birch (music by Roxanna Panufnik, libretto by me). Read it here.
THE horrors of the First World War will meet the tragedy of modern day conflicts in an opera starring more than 180 people from across the community.
Silver Birch, a people's opera, is Garsington Opera's new commission for the 2017 season and is a story of courage and aspiration.
Building on the Great War poetry of Siegfried Sassoon and the testimony of a British soldier who served in the Iraq War it will star local people aged from eight to 80.
Here's what I've said about the process so far..
It is not only the fulfilment of a dream; this creative process, deeply collaborative at every level, has been entirely new to me , and it's one of the most exciting and rewarding experiences I've been lucky enough to encounter. The theme is the impact of war on soldiers and their families, tying together Siegfried Sassoon's World War I poetry and the experiences of those serving in modern warfare. It is designed to appeal to opera regulars and first-time attenders alike. It is fast-paced and action-packed; emotions run high and Roxanna Panufnik has written some incredibly beautiful music, as well as letting her hair down a bit in the battle scene!"
Glyndebourne's announcement today of a new competition for young singers is a big deal indeed. The top prize in the biennial Glyndebourne Opera Cup will be £15,000 and a "platform for launching an international career"; the jury consists of directors, agents and head casting honchos from some of Europe's top operatic organisations; and Sky Arts is to televise an associated series of programmes. Preliminary rounds will be held in different cities and the finals at Glyndebourne itself. Dame Janet Baker is honorary president.
Intriguingly, they have decided to focus on a different composer every time the competition is held - and for the first session in 2018 it is Mozart, with idiomatic accompaniment provided by the OAE.
The contest is the brainchild of Glyndebourne's general director, Sebastian Schwarz, who says:
“I’ve been on the judging panels of a number of singing competitions and have seen what works and what doesn’t. When I arrived at Glyndebourne, with its giant reputation for discovering exceptional talent, it seemed an incredible opportunity to design the perfect singing competition from scratch. To me this means offering maximum benefit to those who enter. This is reflected in the jury which comprises esteemed colleagues representing houses that, like Glyndebourne, have a lot to offer competitors as they seek to develop careers. Our ambition is to establish The Glyndebourne Opera Cup as among the premiere competitions of its kind and we are delighted to be partnering with Sky Arts to bring this to a wider audience.”
Singers up to the age of 28 are eligible. Applications open later this year and preliminary rounds will be held in January in Philadelphia, London and Berlin, with the final next summer at Glyndebourne. The jury is:
Sebastian F. Schwarz, General Director, Glyndebourne (Chair)
Barrie Kosky, Artistic Director, Komische Oper Berlin
David Devan, General Director and President, Opera Philadelphia
Joan Matabosch, Artistic Director, Teatro Real de Madrid
Sophie de Lint, Artistic Director, Zurich Opera and Director designate of Dutch National Opera
Fortunato Ortombina, Artistic Director, Teatro La Fenice, Venice
Pål Christian Moe, Casting Consultant for Bayerische Staatsoper Munich and Glyndebourne
Maria Mot, Associate Director, Vocal & Opera, Intermusica
Absolutely stunning news today from the PRS Foundation that the Keychange initiative has been awarded a grant of €200,000 by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union. The money will enable a new network of female artists and innovators to collaborate and showcase their work at partner festivals from Estonia to Canada. (You can see the participating organisations in the poster above.)
An effort stemming from and building upon the PRS Foundation's experience of running the highly successful Women Make Music fund in the UK, Keychange's far-reaching aim is "to transform Europe's music industry for current and future generations by accelerating recognition of women's artistic and economic value and empowering them to work together across European and international borders".
This talent development initiative will directly benefit 35 music creators and 30 innovative industry professionals, while a digital platform will facilitate the involvement of hundreds more. Participants will be selected through a nomination process and joint selection at the Reeperbahn Festival in Germany in September. The partners plan to present a joint manifesto for change to the European Parliament in 2019.
Vanessa Reed, Chief Executive of PRS Foundation said: “I’m delighted that we’ve succeeded as lead partner in our application to Creative Europe in spite of uncertainties posed by the UK’s decision to leave the European Union. European and international collaboration is essential to the creative and business development of individual artists and the industry as a whole. Keychange’s focus on giving talented women access to international networks and new markets at critical stages in their career will help them realise their potential as future leaders of an industry that is ready for change. I’m proud to be working with such an impressive line-up of festivals and music organisations to realise this ambitious European project which is based on shared values and a joint commitment to shifting the status quo.”
How do you set an atomic bomb to music? To attempt it, you have to think big. Over the centuries, the greatest composers have arguably stood or fallen by their willingness to tackle the giant topics of their time, sometimes those of all time. Bach set the Crucifixion. Beethoven tackled liberty and fraternity. Wagner portrayed the end of the world and its rebirth. In Dr Atomic, John Adams has depicted a night that changed history forever, building up to the test of a nuclear bomb at Los Alamos and, at the last moment, fusing this event with the use of the "gadget" (as some of the characters call it) a few weeks later on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Adams, currently circumnavigating the world for his 70th birthday celebrations, has been in London this week recording the opera with the BBC Symphony Orchestra, finishing with a sort-of-semi-staged concert last night at the Barbican. Although the work was done at ENO when brand new, it isn't performed live often and the chance to be fully immersed in its terrifying world and boundary-crunching approach is not to be missed.
It's a dark, desperate piece that, in exploring an incident that changed humankind into a species capable of destroying its own world, plunges deep into the impulses of the soul - and manipulates our sense of time while doing so. We become intensely aware of the beauty and wonder of the world, the sensuality of it heightened by the poetry selected by Peter Sellars for the libretto, while intensifying the consciousness of horrifying imminent destruction.
John Adams. Photo: Vern Evans
The drama is in many ways inward, as Oppenheimer - at first seemingly transfixed by scientific data and the prospect of a "brilliant luminescence" - then becomes increasingly tortured and implicitly terrified by what he has created. In concert, the effect is in some ways more that of an oratorio than an opera: the settings of poems by John Donne, Charles Baudelaire, Muriel Rukeyser and others offer moments of reflection on love, death, sensuality and beauty, set to music that ebbs and flows in waves of shimmering, multifaceted, orchestral gorgeousness, the voices often soaring across the top in widespread extended phrases that reach both stratospheres and profundities of range, often in quick succession.
The personal interactions could be seen as the equivalent of recitatives and are mostly discussions between the men: General Groves bullies Frank Hubbard to predict good weather for the test even though dangerous storms are taking place, and engages in a lighter-hearted exchange with Oppenheimer about diet [dang! I thought Roxanna and I were the first team to put chocolate brownies into an opera, but no...]. Ensembles are few, though mesmerising when they occur - Wilson's dream of falling from the bomb tower is a case in point. Choruses are illustrative, sometimes devastating - the vision of Vishnu in particular - and the chorus's role is to contextualise, comment and evoke, but not especially to be a human presence.
The overarching time-drama of the whole edifice, though, is not so much Bachian as Wagnerian. The entire three-or-so hours of music is a build-up of tension to the final event. In short, we are waiting for a nuclear bomb to explode. At the end, it does.
Along the way, we sense the shifting of history's tectonic plates - keening violins, shuddering double-basses, the inimitable threat from the bass clarinet, visionary swirls of harp, flashes of lightening from piccolo or trumpet, an extraordinary episode early in act II, brass-led, that builds upwards and outwards, transforming its harmonies continually like a passage Wagner forgot to write. And like the fall of Valhalla, like the death of Stravinsky's Chosen Maiden, the release of tension in the final cataclysm is a form of catharsis. In music, after all, these violent ends sometimes presage a renewal of hope. (Having so said, this opera is probably the scariest musical experience I've encountered since first hearing The Rite of Spring.)
Conducted by the composer himself, the BBC Symphony Orchestra played like people possessed, fully matched by the BBC Singers, sounding like an ensemble twice the actual size (they also put believable American twists into their diction). The soloists were pure gold: Gerald Finley, Adams's original, the powerful and vocally luminous Oppenheimer; Julia Bullock radiant and expressive as Kitty, relishing the sensual poetry of "fierce peace"; Jennifer Johnston a dark, aching Pasqualita. The subsidiary male roles were all characterful and persuasive: Brindley Sherratt a fine Teller, Andrew Staples touching as Wilson, Aubrey Allicock a General Groves one wouldn't want to come up against if one was a weather-forecaster, Marcus Farnsworth and Samuel Sakker excellent as Hubbard and Captain James Nolan.
Staging, handled sensitively by Kenneth Richardson, was necessarily limited as the orchestra is absolutely vast, with a heavy-duty, space-eating plethora of percussion; there's not much room to move, so most of the effect was achieved by costumes and lighting. But there's much that can be done with that: a blaze of red light as the explosion begins, the ensemble cover their eyes - then darkness. As the final recorded voice intones Japanese pleas for help, for water for the children, the orchestra switch off their lights one by one until nothing is left but a ground zero in the pitch-black soul of humanity itself.
One might have expected the standing ovation to continue for longer, but the impression was that much of the audience was seriously shaken up by the experience and probably wanted air, which was in short supply. But one overriding image? The bomb explodes; and the composer stands, measuring out the bars with his baton. Humanity can create the horrors of the atomic bomb. Humanity can also create the wonder of great music about giant topics. Adams has done so.
We've been roots-finding in South Africa these past two weeks. It was 21 years ago that I was last there, having quality time with my terminally-ill father. My parents left in the 1950s and my father had always refused to go back until apartheid fell. After Mandela came to power, Dad spent his last several winters in Cape Town; it was only when I saw him there, in 1996, happy and smiling despite his illness, that I realised he had missed it all his life. Since then I'd had no wish to return, given the painful nature of the associated memories. This time, though, we had incentive as my husband has discovered family to visit too.
Another South African cousin...of Ricki and Cosi.
The place has changed enormously in those two decades. The problems of today are all too evident, in forms including destitution, smog and anxiety about the future. But in 1996 the end of apartheid was relatively recent and evidence of change was slow.
Moving forward...in Addo Elephant Park
Today, though, you can walk around the seaside Garden Route towns of Knysna and Hermanus, explore the Addo Elephant Park, eat out in Port Elizabeth or Cape Town and sense a basic openness and contentment with the multicultural society that has emerged.
As a tourist it's hard to know how deep this goes, but the feeling that everyone is out enjoying the sunshine, the local fruit and seafood and the beauty of the landscapes side by side is something new to me in that country - immeasurably so, compared to my early experiences on childhood visits to family there, which shocked me profoundly when I was a six-year-old in a car passing Soweto.
Kirstenbosch Botanical Gardens, Cape Town
Today a whole generation has grown up without apartheid. And even if my positive impressions are still perhaps more superficial than we starry-eyed visitors would like it to be, even if the future remains uncertain, the politics in upheaval and the dangers no doubt present, it has changed for the better in so many ways that I felt this trip offered a heartening note.
We remember, seeing South Africa, that countries can change for the better. Many others are changing for the worse at the moment, and it's easy to succumb to despair. We shouldn't. Transformation, a positive opening out, is possible, given will, action and enough time.
Melkbosstrand, north of Cape Town
As for the matter of never taking pictures into the sun, I don't buy that. Why not? Why do things the same way all the time? Let's flood the place with light.
