UK Edition
Review
A gripping and moving world premiere from Welsh National Opera - review
Rupert Christiansen sees WNO serve up yet another new work with profound and instant appeal
Hats off to Welsh National Opera, which for the second-time this season has presented the world première of a new work with considerable musical quality and immediate audience appeal. So it can be done: the book of opera is not yet complete.
Following Elena Langer’s Mozartian sequel Figaro gets a Divorce, the young British composer Iain Bell and librettists David Antrobus and Emma Jenkins have adapted David Jones’s In Parenthesis – an extravagant fantasy that weaves Jones’s prosaic experiences on the Western Front in 1916 into his poetic sense of a parallel realm of ancient faery.
Neither the original text nor the opera are strong on narrative. The clutzy but well-meaning Private Ball (a portrait of Jones himself) joins the Royal Welch Fusiliers, experiencing both terror and comradeship as he marches through France. He fights at Mametz Wood and loses his pals. Through the hell and carnage of it all, visions of redemption and heavenly choirs haunt him
It is more a pageant than a plot, but Antrobus and Jenkins have done a good job of filleting Jones’s prolixity and clarifying a set of episodes and defined characters, giving Bell’s music room to make its effect.
And effective it is: gratefully shaped for the voice, competently orchestrated and governed by an innate sense of theatre. The borrowings from Britten may be liberal – there’s a febrile intensity to the writing that evokes Death in Venice, and Billy Budd is all but overtly quoted – yet Bell is no magpie. What the score lacks in originality it makes up in pace and energy. The audience was palpably gripped by two lean acts of about an hour each.
The cast has been drilled with help from the military: Lt-General Jonathon Riley no less. There’s endearing singing and acting from the American tenor Andrew Bidlack as the hapless but inspired Private Ball; George Humphries, Marcus Farnesworth and Donald Maxwell are first-rate as his fellow squaddies and officers. As choric figures representing Britannia and Germania, Peter Coleman-Wright and Alexandra Deshorties are more impressive visually than vocally. The male chorus is sturdy, the female chorus radiant and Carlo Rizzi conducts with blazing commitment.
David Pountney’s staging, resourcefully designed by Robert Innes Hopkins, is expert, faltering only in its flat-footed treatment of the nymphs who haunt Mametz Wood. The result is no masterpiece, but its vigour and sincerity make it both gripping and moving.
Until June 3, then touring to Birmingham and London. Tickets: 029 2063 6464; wno.org.uk