Some people will tell you that contemporary opera is defunct but if that’s the case, nobody told Philip Glass: the American composer’s website lists 27 operas composed over the last 40 years. Akhnaten, originally staged in 1984, is the last in a triptych of “portrait operas” depicting (to use the word loosely) the lives of three men who changed the world they inhabited. The first was Einstein, the second Gandhi, while Akhnaten focuses on the Egyptian pharaoh of the 14th century BC, credited with forcing his subjects to replace their multiple gods with a single deity.
At this stage of his career, Glass took an oblique approach to operatic storytelling. In Akhnaten, little happens but the narrative outline is more or less clear. Most of the text is sung in untranslated Egyptian or Hebrew; when English intrudes, it is mostly in a “Verily I say unto you” narration spoken by a “scribe”. In Phelim McDermott’s new production for English National Opera, Zachary James’s sonorous commitment can’t disguise its bathos. Musically and dramatically Akhnaten doesn’t so much progress as undulate hypnotically, yet there is real sensuality in the sung lines. The title role is taken by a counter-tenor, Anthony Roth Costanzo, his falsetto hinting at the character’s alleged androgyny, a detail subtly picked out at certain points in the staging. His bittersweet timbre mingles voluptuously with the darker tones of Emma Carrington, playing his wife Nefertiti.
In the pit, the ENO orchestra, conducted by Karen Kamensek, adapts well to Glass’s idiom. Since there are no violins in the Akhnaten orchestra, the musical timbres are on the sombre side. Glass was just beginning to expand the minimalist vocabulary of his early work and at times he resorts to orthodox operatic flourishes of brass, percussion, tubular bells, and sometimes all three. Such punctuations add a note of blatancy that is echoed in McDermott’s staging, which resists few opportunities to camp it up: Kevin Pollard’s costumes have a charity-shop glamour, and the cast wear them with a swagger. A gaggle of supernumerary jugglers provide some energy with their routines: tossing their clubs back and forth around the singers, they inject a welcome sense of danger.
And then there is the chorus, acting as a kind of temperature control throughout. Their joyful noise will be missed at the last performance of this run, when, in protest against threatened cuts to their numbers and salaries, they will remain silent during the opera’s opening act. No doubt that will add an extra layer of outlandishness to an opera and a production that are already weird and, just occasionally, wonderful.
Until March 18, Coliseum (020 7845 9300, eno.org)
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