Brokeback Mountain, Teatro Real, Madrid, review

Any adaption of Brokeback Mountain has the spectre and spectacle of Ang Lee’s famous film to contend with. So it is hardly surprising that Charles Wuorinen’s new opera, premiered at the Teatro Real in Madrid, attempts something altogether sparer. Indeed, in transferring this tale of star-crossed love between two Wyoming cowboys to the operatic stage, it goes right back to source: the librettist is Annie Proulx herself.

But consummate writers do not necessarily make natural librettists, and far from paring things down, as most experienced librettists would do, Proulx adds scenes and explanatory back stories. If some of the striking concision of her short story is lost in this two-hour, interval-less opera, at least we get plenty of time to admire her poetic, unvarnished lines. More problematically, they force the composer to spend much of his time simply keeping up, rather than allowing him to pause and expand on a musical idea.

When it comes to avoiding comparisons with the movie, though, no one could be less like a film composer than Wuorinen, now the doyen of American modernists. He was the choice of Gerard Mortier, the Teatro Real’s departing (and gravely ill) artistic director, who conceived the work originally for New York City Opera and brought the unfulfilled commission with him to Madrid.

Nor is Wuorinen exactly a natural when it comes to opera, though his operatic credits include Haroun and the Sea of Stories (Rushdie adapted by James Fenton). Yet, putting aside the nondescript parlando of his vocal lines, there is plenty for the ear to absorb in this performance under the conductor Titus Engel – and, right from the doom-laden opening, the score captures the craggy, elemental landscape that Jack Twist and Ennis Del Mar inhabit.

Almost any cross-section of Wuorinen’s post-serial score – sometimes recalling late Stravinsky – registers interestingly enough, but cumulatively it fails to develop, and the musical characterisation is thin. When Jack’s father-in-law comes back as a ghost, amusingly named Hog-Boy, the reference to Mozart’s Commendatore falls flat – just one of many moments of operatic potential that are not fulfilled.

Most different of all, the visual look eschews epic cinematography in favour of Ivo van Hove’s plain production. Some video of the Wyoming wilds is projected in bleached tones onto the set’s blank walls, and much of the action takes place on an almost empty stage. When the parallel Twist and Del Mar households are shown, the set suggests a cluttered Sixties furniture store. Those scenes that feel a little, er, broken-backed might well be transformed by a more compelling production.

Yet nothing of this prevents Tom Randle and Daniel Okulitch from delivering moving performances as the leading men. Randle’s keen tenor is suited to Jack’s neediness, and contrasts with Okulitch’s bass-baritonal brooding as Ennis. Heather Buck and Jane Henschel create telling portraits as Alma (Ennis’s wife) and Jack’s Mother, bewildered by the death of her son. Ethan Herschenfeld brings dark, sculpted tone to his roles as the foreman Aguirre and, later, Hog-Boy.

For all its flaws, the work is a serious and powerful tragedy, not so much about gay – or even bisexual – love as a universal portrait of thwarted human relationships.

Teatro Real, Madrid, to Feb 11. Tickest: +34 902 24 4848; teatro-real.com