The Ice Break, Birmingham Opera Company, review: 'lush'

Frozen up since its première in the late Seventies, Michael Tippett’s fourth opera has been withdrawn from cold storage, thawed and re-heated in a remarkable production by the director Graham Vick and his Birmingham Opera Company.

The score of The Ice Break emerges as nothing short of magnificent – 75 minutes of incandescent late romanticism, scored with a lush sensuality which embraces the sonorities of electric guitars and a vast percussion section. Sometimes shimmering and ecstatic, sometimes nervous and thunderous, it pivots on two serenely beautiful melismatic monologues for meditative female characters. Around these still points, the musical temperature is kept close to boiling point, exultantly inventive and boldly chromatic.

The conductor Andrew Gourlay and the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra bravely labour under an erratically resonant acoustic and the problems of synchronisation that BOC’s performing practice throw up. But the essence gets through triumphantly: there’s a spiritual grandeur at work here that few of Tippett’s contemporaries can match.

If only his libretto wasn’t such a half-baked pudding of crossed-wires and preachy pretensions, sprawling over a range of issues far too large and wide for any sort of focus to be maintained. Like Tippett’s earlier operas, The Ice Break ends up sinking under its own weight.

In its story, the Russian dissident and pacifist Lev returns to America after 20 years of imprisonment. He finds his wife, Nadia, in despair and confronts “the generation gap” in his relationship with his disaffected son, Yuri. The world outside is in a chaos of ideological confusion, rejecting the principle of “liberal charity”. Mobs protest, riot and fight as the media muddle the message and violent racism spreads virally.

Tippett completely fails to weave these strands into a coherent plot, and subsidiary ingredients such as a sporting star called Olympion who proclaims “I’m black and I’m beautiful” and a duet of delusory psychedelic messengers from outer space are never integrated into the crazy narrative fabric. The opera ends with the promise that the ice will break and humankind can move upwards and onwards. But why this should be any more than a fond hope is never explained.

Birmingham Opera Company is undaunted by the visionary battiness of it all. Using an empty warehouse in a rough part of the city, Graham Vick and his designer Stuart Nunn have brilliantly created the simulacrum of an airport terminal in which the audience becomes anxious passengers, shepherded by security guards and harassed by crowds played by members of local community groups.

In the mêlée, Lev (Andrew Slater), Nadia (Nadine Benjamin) and Yuri (Ross Ramgobin) struggle to make their characters register, but they sing with clarity and passion, as do Stephanie Corley as Yuri’s punk girlfriend, Ta’u Pupu’a as Olympion and Chrystal E Williams as a sympathetic nurse. The community chorus sings up a storm – and bravo to their unflappable master Jonathan Laird.

It’s like reading the prophetic books of William Blake: God alone knows what they’re on about, but the power and the glory which irradiates the obscure sermon is dazzlingly wonderful.

Box office 0121 246 6632, www.birminghamopera.org.uk (until Thursday)