Sir David Pountney’s Masque of Might, his first new production for Opera North since 2011, has been launched as a world premiere as the centrepiece of the company’s “Green Season”, during which recycled sets, props and costumes all have an eco-friendly tag. It could be described as a semi-opera in line with equivalents in the Baroque era, as a tribute to the music of Henry Purcell, and as an assemblage of satirical scenes dealing with the evils of dictatorship and the damage done to the natural world by human beings. The messages probably only reinforced the views of the already-convinced, but no matter: it was wonderful to experience dozens of examples of the great Purcell’s work, from the obscure to the well-known.
Pountney makes Diktat the main focus, a character, or rather caricature, whose name says it all. As in Gillray’s cartoons or Spitting Image, subtlety is out. In Part One he is all-powerful, looked down upon by Nebulous and Elena, two disapproving beings, and honoured by a pair of sycophants, Tousel Blond and Ginger Strumpet. Placard-wearing climate protesters and dissidents iang as they are paraded in front of him as his abused prisoners.
Heroic bass Callum Thorpe fitted the part well, bringing to mind his appearance last year in as the cut-throat Sparafucile, pure wickedness. Thorpe transformed in Part Two into a clone of Vladimir Putin, his chest covered by a kind of breastplate of medals after stripping to the waist to kill a delightfully gimcrack wild boar which seemed to be fashioned from cardboard boxes, as he sang “Like Hercules I killed the boar” from Dioclesian. His throne, designed by Leslie Travers, a welded-together collection of chairs, stood for the structure of the whole production. Countertenors James Hall (Ginger Strumpet) and James Hall (Tousel Blond) were highly committed to their roles as vicious clown-like guards tormenting their captives. Icelandic bass-baritone Andri Björn Róbertsson gave a fine, rather aggressive performance as Nebulous and as Activist.
The Opera North Chorus made a great impact in Part One. Shabbily costumed, like massed factory workers from an old black and white film, they delivered “Come ye sons of Art, away’ from Ode for the birthday of Queen Mary with enormous zest. This was followed by “Sound the trumpet”, also from the Ode, which provided a significant number of items throughout. In Part Two, they had terrifying fixed smiles as they brandished brightly coloured pompoms and sang blessings to the increasingly powerful Diktat, like well-drilled cheerleaders in North Korea, or perhaps in the United States: sometimes the universality of the message was undermined by specific contemporary references, as when, for example, an ominous character looking just like Joseph Stalin rose from the dead in Part Two to give advice.
Pountney, a lifelong Purcell admirer, found a remarkable number of references to the current climate crisis in the music and poetry of the 17th century, finding promising material in the masques of the time, when tragicomedy was dominant. He made a few tweaks and added several lines of text in “This talk of doom is all a hoax”, set to music from that birthday ode. Music from the composer’s The Fairy Queen, which he recreated for the stage nearly three decades ago, appears just once, in “O let me ever, ever weep”. Soprano Anna Dennis as Elena sang this with great warmth. The words of major poets like John Dryden are given new connotations and contexts, as in “Ye twice ten hundred deities” from The Indian Queen, and the priestly George Herbert provides “With sick and famished eyes”, but lesser poets were also found useful, for example Francis Quarles, with “The earth trembled”. I thought some of the words were too formulaic for modern tastes, but Purcell transforms everything.
I imagine that the orchestra, conducted by Harry Bicket, provided something close to original Baroque sounds. The performance ended with a rousing rendering of “Welcome, welcome glorious morn”, originally intended for Queen Mary’s birthday but in this case providing an optimistic, happy finale, along with dancers dressed as sunflowers.
