The Shape of the Earth (2018) is a monodrama by Jack Symonds and Pierce Wilcox (male composer and male librettist). It is searing music, deeply amplified, that responds to its jagged text with affinity and affect. It certainly assaults the senses.
The arc of the work’s 21 sections is a discernible discourse on isolated masculinity – lost in the desert of their longing for human connection and understanding - face down in the clotted earth when we first encounter the protagonist. He returns to the same earth – in semi foetal position - at the works conclusion, blinded and crazed, the beauty of the distant stars now but a memory. The immensity of his void is too much for him.
It is a punishing role for the performer, thrilling at times, poetic in stretches but its rancorous mood lacks elemental contrasts, despite the plethora of ppp and fff (sometimes in the same bar). The sprechstimme is at time humorous, playful, withering, haunting, but the violence of the emotional terrain is wearying. The performance by Mitchell Riley was exemplary. With his burnished baritone and fierce falsetto, he gives everything the composer asks for, the humming, the exhalation, the elongation, the nagging intensity – to deliver a brilliant theatrical experience. He is the ultimate male marionette, laconic at times, jerked on high and across the stage. His sound world is drawn from Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunnaire, and lacerates in a similar manner, but in musical terms it is somewhat myopic.
The score involves piano and electronics, and various interventions on the piano strings: “muted with blue tac”, “with e-bow on string”, “move a plectrum on the indicated string’. With Jack Symonds at the piano, this was a visceral performance by a composer deeply engaged in his unrelenting creation.
The opening of section XIII was arresting and affecting – when elongated vowels and juddering vocal frameworks supported the emotional intent of the man’s inherent loneliness - while XVIII (“Suffocation”) was technically dazzling, the detailed and extreme dynamics and stuttering vocal palette mirroring the emotional statue of the abandoned male archetype. In these instances, poetry and music fused with emotional elegance.
But at 45 minutes, the piece is just too long to sustain our interest in the unrelenting anger and the thematic material, though the sheer range of percussive effects that the composer and electronics offsider (Benjamin Cary) drew from limited resources were dazzling as sonorities. In this work, aphoristic poetic text seems to elongate sense and meaning, overwhelming us on the journey of this everyman and his existentialist encounter with toxic masculinity. It luxuriate in its aggression. A more concentrated aetiology might have sharpened its contours – al a Webern – to condense and haunt in its engagement with a live audience.
The stage direction by Alexander Berlage was exemplary, mining the embedded circular mirror stage with deft fecundity, while plotting the harrowing and violent demise of a lonely man. The back lighting was deeply shocking.
La Voix Humaine (1958) by Poulenc and Cocteau – like The Shape of the Earth – is a monodrama, this time for a woman experiencing the intense emotional state of a relationship breakdown. Written by two gay men, it explores the intense delusion of forsaken love, articulating all its despair and ecstasy – while shaping it into a modern tale of humans and their mid twentieth century telecommunications. Menotti’s The Telephone (1947) takes a breezy, more American approach to these operatic possibilities.
Celeste Lazarenko was in marvellous form. Her crystalline voice, clearly articulated and engaged with the French text, while her dynamic range was breathtaking. The soft voiced terms of endearment that underpin her surrender and resistance to the lover who has forsaken her were delivered and listened to with hushed intent. The outpouring of unforgotten love that Poulenc embeds in the work was grandly and voluptuously expressed by Lazarenko.
The staging (Clemence Williams) was slashed with bold humour. The unveiling of the gigantic red telephone and its elongated chord generated sustained laughter, but also tenderness when “She” curled her body around the oversize phone and talked about feeling and hearing her lovers voice, and the vibrations of her love.
Poulenc’s music is a triumph of aphoristic tension and release, and the melancholic lilt that underpins much of his works. It beautifully mirrors the tease/reveal of the women’s attempted suicide with aplomb - underpinned by that profound and knowing sensual ache that Poulenc could always mine.
Poulenc’s biographer Ivry (1996) argues that the composer poured “immense anguish into his opera. Like her he abused sleeping pills, tranquilizers, and anti-depressants”. Written following the triumph of his Dialogues des Carmelites (1957), it showed a French opera composer at the height of his power in a deeply concentrated format. And Poulenc shapes his protagonist beyond Cocteau’s imagining, with quietness, modesty, and veiled hysterics, deepening the anger and its trajectory.
Though written for soprano and orchestra, the piano reduction used here was startlingly percussive and supported the unfolding drama with finesse and energy. Poulenc forbade performances of the piano version, but his niece allowed such performance to occur post 2013. Given the coloristic nature of Poulenc’s orchestration it would be lovely to hear this work in its full glory.
The final shorter work (female composer and male librettist) was also about love, loss and regret. Quatre Instants was composed by Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho in 2002.
Staged in dense fog (Clemence Williams) with ropes, glass buoy and pier log as props that moved in sequence with the emotional terrain of the work, this was a haunting evocation of the experiences of a woman who has loved deeply. The music and text allow us engage with her deep grained memories.
Emily Edmond’s voice showed some strain and occasionally lacked the deep sonorities that the music seemed to call for, but her engagement with the French text was exemplary and the handling of the props full of resilience.
In the final section, “Resonances”, the staging and the music were bound together beautifully. Here, the singer slowly spun time, like one of the Norn’s, balancing us as audience on the fulcrum of the pier log that spun with slow regression. This was hypnotic and full of vocal finesse, as each of the previous sections returns with threads of remembrance. ‘Ju suis la barque que derive” and “Mais je femme les yeux” return, now transformed into a different kind of yearning, more mysterious, more bedded in the experience of love and loss – but still full of yearning. These highly poetic fragments – like the libretto for The Shape of the Earth – bought forth a distinctive response – both languorous and crystalline, almost suggesting a connection with Debussy and Rimbaud.
Originally written for piano and voice (the renowned Finnish soprano, Karita Matilla), Saariaho also orchestrated the work for small orchestra – preserving what she said was the “clear bright sounds of the original”. Given its connections to Debussy – it would be lovely to hear it embedded in its orchestral tableau.
The costuming and set designs by James Lew were effective and contrasting across the three works. The lighting design by Alexander Berlage was an integral and searing part of the overall production. As always, the surtitles (Ezra Hersch and Alexander Maltas) guided the audiences’ comprehension across coruscating and poetic texts.
Once more, Sydney Chamber Opera have given us a fine evening, with a beautifully curated and produced operatic experience.
Sydney Chamber Opera, Carriageworks, Sydney, October 2, 2023
Gar Jones
The arc of the work’s 21 sections is a discernible discourse on isolated masculinity – lost in the desert of their longing for human connection and understanding - face down in the clotted earth when we first encounter the protagonist. He returns to the same earth – in semi foetal position - at the works conclusion, blinded and crazed, the beauty of the distant stars now but a memory. The immensity of his void is too much for him.
It is a punishing role for the performer, thrilling at times, poetic in stretches but its rancorous mood lacks elemental contrasts, despite the plethora of ppp and fff (sometimes in the same bar). The sprechstimme is at time humorous, playful, withering, haunting, but the violence of the emotional terrain is wearying. The performance by Mitchell Riley was exemplary. With his burnished baritone and fierce falsetto, he gives everything the composer asks for, the humming, the exhalation, the elongation, the nagging intensity – to deliver a brilliant theatrical experience. He is the ultimate male marionette, laconic at times, jerked on high and across the stage. His sound world is drawn from Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunnaire, and lacerates in a similar manner, but in musical terms it is somewhat myopic.
The score involves piano and electronics, and various interventions on the piano strings: “muted with blue tac”, “with e-bow on string”, “move a plectrum on the indicated string’. With Jack Symonds at the piano, this was a visceral performance by a composer deeply engaged in his unrelenting creation.
The opening of section XIII was arresting and affecting – when elongated vowels and juddering vocal frameworks supported the emotional intent of the man’s inherent loneliness - while XVIII (“Suffocation”) was technically dazzling, the detailed and extreme dynamics and stuttering vocal palette mirroring the emotional statue of the abandoned male archetype. In these instances, poetry and music fused with emotional elegance.
But at 45 minutes, the piece is just too long to sustain our interest in the unrelenting anger and the thematic material, though the sheer range of percussive effects that the composer and electronics offsider (Benjamin Cary) drew from limited resources were dazzling as sonorities. In this work, aphoristic poetic text seems to elongate sense and meaning, overwhelming us on the journey of this everyman and his existentialist encounter with toxic masculinity. It luxuriate in its aggression. A more concentrated aetiology might have sharpened its contours – al a Webern – to condense and haunt in its engagement with a live audience.
The stage direction by Alexander Berlage was exemplary, mining the embedded circular mirror stage with deft fecundity, while plotting the harrowing and violent demise of a lonely man. The back lighting was deeply shocking.
La Voix Humaine (1958) by Poulenc and Cocteau – like The Shape of the Earth – is a monodrama, this time for a woman experiencing the intense emotional state of a relationship breakdown. Written by two gay men, it explores the intense delusion of forsaken love, articulating all its despair and ecstasy – while shaping it into a modern tale of humans and their mid twentieth century telecommunications. Menotti’s The Telephone (1947) takes a breezy, more American approach to these operatic possibilities.
Celeste Lazarenko was in marvellous form. Her crystalline voice, clearly articulated and engaged with the French text, while her dynamic range was breathtaking. The soft voiced terms of endearment that underpin her surrender and resistance to the lover who has forsaken her were delivered and listened to with hushed intent. The outpouring of unforgotten love that Poulenc embeds in the work was grandly and voluptuously expressed by Lazarenko.
The staging (Clemence Williams) was slashed with bold humour. The unveiling of the gigantic red telephone and its elongated chord generated sustained laughter, but also tenderness when “She” curled her body around the oversize phone and talked about feeling and hearing her lovers voice, and the vibrations of her love.
Poulenc’s music is a triumph of aphoristic tension and release, and the melancholic lilt that underpins much of his works. It beautifully mirrors the tease/reveal of the women’s attempted suicide with aplomb - underpinned by that profound and knowing sensual ache that Poulenc could always mine.
Poulenc’s biographer Ivry (1996) argues that the composer poured “immense anguish into his opera. Like her he abused sleeping pills, tranquilizers, and anti-depressants”. Written following the triumph of his Dialogues des Carmelites (1957), it showed a French opera composer at the height of his power in a deeply concentrated format. And Poulenc shapes his protagonist beyond Cocteau’s imagining, with quietness, modesty, and veiled hysterics, deepening the anger and its trajectory.
Though written for soprano and orchestra, the piano reduction used here was startlingly percussive and supported the unfolding drama with finesse and energy. Poulenc forbade performances of the piano version, but his niece allowed such performance to occur post 2013. Given the coloristic nature of Poulenc’s orchestration it would be lovely to hear this work in its full glory.
The final shorter work (female composer and male librettist) was also about love, loss and regret. Quatre Instants was composed by Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho in 2002.
Staged in dense fog (Clemence Williams) with ropes, glass buoy and pier log as props that moved in sequence with the emotional terrain of the work, this was a haunting evocation of the experiences of a woman who has loved deeply. The music and text allow us engage with her deep grained memories.
Emily Edmond’s voice showed some strain and occasionally lacked the deep sonorities that the music seemed to call for, but her engagement with the French text was exemplary and the handling of the props full of resilience.
In the final section, “Resonances”, the staging and the music were bound together beautifully. Here, the singer slowly spun time, like one of the Norn’s, balancing us as audience on the fulcrum of the pier log that spun with slow regression. This was hypnotic and full of vocal finesse, as each of the previous sections returns with threads of remembrance. ‘Ju suis la barque que derive” and “Mais je femme les yeux” return, now transformed into a different kind of yearning, more mysterious, more bedded in the experience of love and loss – but still full of yearning. These highly poetic fragments – like the libretto for The Shape of the Earth – bought forth a distinctive response – both languorous and crystalline, almost suggesting a connection with Debussy and Rimbaud.
Originally written for piano and voice (the renowned Finnish soprano, Karita Matilla), Saariaho also orchestrated the work for small orchestra – preserving what she said was the “clear bright sounds of the original”. Given its connections to Debussy – it would be lovely to hear it embedded in its orchestral tableau.
The costuming and set designs by James Lew were effective and contrasting across the three works. The lighting design by Alexander Berlage was an integral and searing part of the overall production. As always, the surtitles (Ezra Hersch and Alexander Maltas) guided the audiences’ comprehension across coruscating and poetic texts.
Once more, Sydney Chamber Opera have given us a fine evening, with a beautifully curated and produced operatic experience.
Sydney Chamber Opera, Carriageworks, Sydney, October 2, 2023
Gar Jones