Bernard-Marie Koltès’ Roberto Zucco (translated by Martin Crimp) is currently playing at Buddies in Bad Times in a production directed by ted witzel. It’s a piece from the 1980s, written as Koltès was dying of AIDS and set in the mean streets of the less salubrious part of a European city, perhaps Paris.
Picture a Day Like This is the latest operatic collaboration between George Benjamin and Martin Crimp (Written on Skin, Lessons in Love and Violence). It’s basically an hour long chamber opera written for five singers and chamber orchestra and it’s now been recorded for CD by Nimbus.
The basic plot line is that a child has died but her mother can revive her if, within 24 hours, she can obtain a sleeve button from a truly happy person. She is given an itinerary to follow to find the likely candidates. In the course of six scenes she encounters two lovers whose relationship is apparently idyllic until the question of what “open” means comes up. (It’s possibly the first serious use of the idea of polyamory in the modern sense in an opera.) There’s an artisan who is superficially happy though he turns out to be going nuts because he’s been replaced by a machine. There’s a composer who is immensely successful but full of self doubt and a collector who owns everything he admires but is utterly alone. The only truly happy person is the enigmatic Zabelle… who turns out not to exist. Continue reading
George Benjamin’s latest opera Lessons in Love and Violence debuted at Covent Garden last year. It was broadcast on the BBC and is still available on the web from Arte and has also been released on DVD and Blu-ray. This review is based on the Blu-ray version.
Written on Skin; music by George Benjamin, text by Martin Crimp, was first seen at the Aix en Provence festival in 2012. The following yewar it was given, in the same production by Katie Mitchell and with substantially the same cast, at Covent Garden. Both versions were televised and now the ROH version has been released on DVD and Blu-ray. It’s an unusual, complex and rewarding work. 21st century angels decide, for reasons not entirely clear, to return to the 13th century to create and participate in a human drama. The medieval humans are The Protector; a rich man of mature years utterly confident of his privileged position and his own righteousness, and his wife Agnès; younger, illiterate, downtrodden. Into their world comes The Boy; one of the angels in fact, who will create for The Protector an illuminated book; a precious object celebrating his wealth and worthiness. Inevitably, The Boy and Agnès fall in love and The Protector’s revenge, whipped up by the angels, is quite revoltingly violent. It’s essentially a simple and classic plot but Crimp shapes it skilfully with carefully placed anachronisms and by using the device of having the characters, sometimes, narrate their own actions in the third person. Benjamin’s score is in a modern idiom. He’s not afraid of atonality and he uses a very wide range of colours to create a score that ranges from meditational to almost unbearably violent. Certainly words and music work together here to great effect.
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