Review George Benjamin Lessons in Love and Violence
Thou eorge Benjamin'due south first fully fledged opera, Written on Peel, has been performed widely since its premiere at the Aix-en-Provence festival six years ago and it is no surprise that his second has been co-commissioned by seven opera companies, in western Europe and the U.s.a.. This time the Royal Opera gets the privilege of unveiling information technology; for Lessons in Love and Violence, Benjamin has again worked with the librettist Martin Crimp, and entrusted the production to director Katie Mitchell and designer Vicki Mortimer.
As in Written on Skin (and in the music-theatre piece Into the Little Loma before it) Benjamin and Crimp have used a medieval source for this unremittingly bleak demonstration of the corrosive consequences of love and obsession. This time, though, the source is a historical one. Lessons in Love and Violence is based upon the life of Edward Two and his passion for his courtier Piers Gaveston, which led to him losing the throne – and to his murder shortly later on.
Though scholars are divided over whether Edward's relationship with Gaveston was a sexual 1 or whether it was his failings every bit a monarch that led to his downfall, Benjamin and Crimp'south retelling is unambiguous: it is the rex'south infatuation with Gaveston, and his extravagance in entertaining him while many of his subjects starve, that leads to his and his lover's destruction. Information technology's the king'south children, a son (the future Edward III) and a daughter, who learn the brutal lessons of the opera's title all too well, as the ending – Crimp's, non history's – horrifyingly shows.
In the libretto Edward is known simply every bit the Rex; his wife Isabella becomes Isabel, Gaveston retains his name and Mortimer is the military advisor who precipitates the crisis in the monarch's individual and public lives. The text is spare, its linguistic communication more or less timeless, and fits easily into the 21st-century setting of Mitchell's beautifully detailed production. The set is an elegant bedroom, viewed from unlike sides in each scene; on one wall is a Francis Bacon-similar portrait, and on some other a fully stocked and beautifully lit marine aquarium, which is seen emptied and devoid of all life in the opera's second one-half.
In that location's a pervading air of menace, simply the drama's implicit violence only becomes explicit in some of the orchestral interludes. If Benjamin's score is non quite as luminous and fallacious as his orchestral writing in Written in Skin, in that location are notwithstanding some remarkable colours and furnishings – soaring horn lines, long, self-renewing melodic strands, pungent punctuations from cimbalom and wooden percussion. That is matched in some of Benjamin's vocal writing, especially Isabel's spiralling melismas , tailor-made for Barbara Hannigan's extraordinary agility, and the lustrous honeyed lines in the final scenes for the the high-tenor role of the Son (who becomes Edward Iii), beautifully delivered by Samuel Boden.
But the writing for the other male protagonists – Stéphane Degout equally the increasingly bereft King, Peter Hoare the incipiently fascist Mortimer and Gyula Orendt the suave chancer Gaveston – is far less absorbing, functional rather than lyrical. And despite the care that has and then clearly gone into every aspect of the production, it often seems to exist the orchestral music that is actually in accuse of the drama, as if the usual priorities of opera take been reversed. In the terminate the terrible story becomes the excuse for some striking music rather than existence driven along by it.
- At the Purple Opera House, London, until 26 May. Box office: 020-7304 4000.
- This slice has been edited to correct an error. The part of the Son is a high-tenor function, not a countertenor, as originally written.
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/music/2018/may/11/lessons-in-love-and-violence-review-royal-opera-house-george-benjamin
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