The curtain rises on a darkened stage, a hall of mirrors around which, as the lights fade slowly up, sober figures roam. Then The Woman appears, simply dressed, demure. She sings of the death of her small child in a voice that starts out matter-of-fact and becomes increasingly desperate. Then, she is offered a get-out-of-jail card: if she can return, before a day has passed, with a button from the sleeve of a genuinely happy person, her son can be returned to life. She is given a list of candidates: lovers, an expert craftsman, a brilliant composer, a collector of exquisite art treasures and, finally, Zabelle and her beautiful garden. The scenes that follow will be her quest.
The intimate Théâtre du Jeu de Paume saw the world premiere of Picture a day like this, by Sir George Benjamin and Martin Crimp, their fourth opera and the third in succession to be premiered at the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence. Whereas Written on Skin and Lessons in Love and Violence were dramatic tales of brutal events painted on a large scale, Picture a day like this harkens back to Benjamin and Crimp’s first opera, the fairytale chamber opera Into the Little Hill, a fable that explores the borders between reality and imagination, written for just five singers and a couple of dozen musicians.
Marianne Crebassa explored the five stages of the human response to grief – denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance – with every corner of her voice. She didn’t need undue histrionics, nor did the voice ever degrade into harshness or shouting; rather, each mood was depicted by the shifting colour of the voice and her expert control over dynamics and rubato. What this opera shares with the duo’s previous two is the exquisite level of poetry in Crimp’s words, matched with Benjamin’s exceptional way of writing for voice and its orchestral accompaniment. The vocal lines fit Crebassa like a glove and the Mahler Chamber Orchestra (conducted by Benjamin) matched the vocal lines perfectly with an infinite variety of timbres and textures. The result was an intravenous injection of the emotions portrayed.
Crebassa was the undoubted star of the show, but the other singers were no less virtuosic. As the pair of lovers, soprano Beate Mordal and countertenor Cameron Shahbazi intertwined the sweetness of their vocal lines as sinuously as the physical entanglement of the limbs of these two people who can’t keep their hands off each other. They reappear in a completely different guise as the driven career-woman composer and her besuited assistant, head permanently stuck in his cellphone. An even more extraordinary voice is that of John Brancy, first as the Artisan, the creator of wonderful things, then as the Collector who understands the world only through the great art works he possesses. Brancy seemed to be able to move between baritone and high countertenor registers with no joins and no apparent effort, one of those real “how does he do that” pieces of singing. The inner demons of each character is revealed in turn, until we reach the last, Zabelle, who has an apparently faultless life in her garden, wonderfully depicted on a scrim by Hicham Berrada’s video projections. The honeyed, sympathetic tones of Anna Prohaska eventually resolves the mystery: the end result is ambiguous but utterly satisfying.
Daniel Jeanneteau and Marie-Christine Soma’s staging doesn’t call attention to itself, but if you look carefully at each scene, you realise how intelligently it’s all done, from the funereal atmosphere of the start to the cage in which the artisan finds himself to the (literal) treadmill on which the composer is constantly in motion.
Picture a day like this shares the best qualities of Written on Skin and Lessons in Love and Violence – the poetry, the quality of singing, the score, the sure-footed sense of the dramatic. But where the previous operas were unremittingly bleak, Picture a day like this has a huge heart. I empathised enormously not just with The Woman but with almost all the people she meets, and came out filled with catharsis and new understanding of the process of grieving. Its 75 minutes were the most inspiring I have ever spent in an opera house. When it comes to a city near you (as it will for many – there are seven co-production partners), don’t miss it. And someone please give Martin Crimp a knighthood to match Benjamin’s.
