Benjamin, George

Subterms

    Latest story

    113 Shares99 Views

    At the Aix Festival, Premieres in Pursuit of Happiness

    by

    Two works at the Aix-en-Provence Festival, by two inventive opera partnerships, use fables to explore grief and queer utopian dreams.Happiness doesn’t come quickly. Aristotle claimed that as one swallow does not make spring, neither does one good day make someone happy. That would take a lifetime, at least.Those measures — days, lifetimes, even generations — are put to the test in the pursuit of happiness in two new, fablelike works at the Aix-en-Provence Festival in France: George Benjamin and Martin Crimp’s “Picture a Day Like This,” and Philip Venables and Ted Huffman’s “The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions.”Yet in either case, time doesn’t guarantee anyone’s success in reaching that elusive goal.In “Picture” — Benjamin and Crimp’s fourth opera, a taut one-act of masterly craft — the aim is to find the embodiment of happiness. The protagonist, a woman whose infant son has died, is told that if she cuts a button from the sleeve of a happy person’s shirt, her child will be brought back to life. She has until nightfall, and is equipped only with a sheet of paper listing whom to seek.Crimp’s text, characteristically mysterious and strange, both untethered from reality and peppered with the banality of daily life, is something of a return to the aesthetic his first collaboration with Benjamin, “Into the Little Hill,” a 2006 retelling of the Pied Piper legend. (They went on to create the well-traveled psychosexual thriller “Written on Skin,” as well as a similar follow-up, “Lessons in Love and Violence.”) Here, in what makes for a natural double bill with “Little Hill,” Crimp draws from folk tale, the Alexander Romance, Christianity and Buddhism for a synthesis not unlike Wagner’s grab-bag approach to mythology.The woman encounters several archetypal personalities on her quest, a journey redolent of the Little Prince among the planets, or Alice in Wonderland. There are a pair of lovers, an erstwhile artisan, a composer and a collector. In a series of scenes, subtly linked in Benjamin’s score but operating as discrete set pieces, these people present as happy but crumble at the slightest scrutiny or self-disclosure. Only Zabelle, a seeming mirror image of the woman, has the wisdom to offer her something more like contentment, and salvation.In Daniel Jeanneteau and Marie-Christine Soma’s straightforward, intimate production at the Théâtre du Jeu de Paume, each scene fluidly emerges from three walls that wrap around the stage. Marie La Rocca’s unintrusive costumes differentiate the characters, who are played by a small cast in multiple roles: the soprano Beate Mordal, nimbly lyrical as a lover and the composer; the elegant countertenor Cameron Shahbazi as the other lover, weaving darkly sensual lines, and the composer’s assistant; and the baritone John Brancy as the artisan and the collector.Crebassa, left, and the baritone John Brancy, a standout in “Picture a Day Like This.”Jean-Louis FernandezBrancy is given some of Benjamin’s most adventurous vocal writing in the piece, and rises to it with impressive skill — seamless passaggio between the richly resonant depths of his range and a weightless, dreamy falsetto, about three and a half octaves from a low B flat to a soprano E.Special care appears to have been given, as well, to the soprano Anna Prohaska as Zabelle, her sympathetic stage presence feeding Benjamin’s firm yet humane music for her, and vice versa. In Zabelle’s scene, what is described in the libretto as her garden is rendered in video projections by the artist Hicham Berrada that show a barren aquarium as it blooms with surreal, alien life alluringly lush and menacing.As the woman, the mezzo-soprano Marianne Crebassa is determined but aching, her resolute manner betrayed by tense vibrato or wide-eyed concern. It’s through her that Benjamin, who also conducted the excellent players of the Mahler Chamber Orchestra in the pit, ties together his episodic score. Her reading the sheet of paper is accompanied by a motif of muted trumpets and a trombone; tubular bells, quietly embedded in each scene’s climax, suggest a clock striking, and time running out.Her race against time, however, is less important in the end than the woman’s epiphanic encounter with Zabelle. Whether that leads to happiness is impossible to say in a day, and is as ambiguous as Benjamin’s music itself, which despite its immaculate construction is never obviously representational or tidily resolved.Collin Shay, at center singing into a loudspeaker, and other performers in the 15-person ensemble of Phillip Venables and Ted Huffman’s new show, seen here in its premiere at the Manchester International Festival in England a week before its opening at Aix.Tristram KentonAmbivalent, too, is Venables and Huffman’s show, “The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions,” at the Pavillon Noir. This music theater adaptation of the cult classic Larry Mitchell book of the same name from 1977, with illustrations by Ned Asta, recasts queer history in mythic, utopian terms in opposition to the patriarchy, referred to as “the Men.” (Among the work’s co-commissioners is NYU Skirball in New York, where it will travel next year.) Whereas the ’70s fable ends with uncertainty, Venables and Huffman take the story even further, introducing a cautionary tale of assimilation and offering a vision for life after the revolutions that Mitchell said “will engulf us all.”The last collaboration between Venables, a composer, and Huffman, a writer and director, was the 2019 opera “Denis & Katya,” a chamber piece based on the true story of two Russian teenagers who a few years earlier had run away from home, hidden in a cabin and died in a shootout with police. Barely more than an hour long, yet smoothly layered and ethically complex, that work was fundamentally about how stories are formed and told.And how they are performed; “Denis & Katya” existed in a theatrical space, occupied by two singers and four cellists, but also decorated with projections of Venables and Huffman’s correspondence, devoid of hierarchy or operatic tradition. It’s a concept the creators take even further in their new show, an astonishing feat of controlled chaos in which an ensemble of 15 does it all: sings, narrates, dances, plays instruments.Venables’s score is a delirious stylistic fantasia, with elements of folk, jazzy turns of phrase and Baroque instrumentation. He exercises a restraint similar to Benjamin’s, and is explicit, to comic effect, only when he is at his most prurient: An episode near the beginning recounts “the ritual” of cruising, building toward a climax of “ecstatic communion” and the exchange of something vulgar that can’t be repeated here, before the music quickly subsides to a piano. The Richard Strauss of “Der Rosenkavalier” and “Symphonia Domestica” would be proud.Throughout the show, no one artist can be easily described, because no one artist has a defined role. This approach to theater-making, in which each performer is essential to the whole, is particularly suited to the spirit of Mitchell’s book and its roots in his time at the Lavender Hill commune for gay men and lesbians in upstate New York.Kit Green, left, and Yandass, two of the show’s narrators.Tristram KentonBut some of the performers are given a little brighter spotlight. The musical direction of Yshani Perinpanayagam, an agile instrumentalist, holds the group together in crucial moments. Two of the narrators naturally stand out: Yandass, a dynamo of speech delivery and dance, and Kit Green, a presence at once charismatic, commanding and thoroughly comedic. Venable’s score is at its most patient showcasing the vocal beauty of Deepa Johnny and Katherine Goforth, but also reveals flashes of Collin Shay’s gifted countertenor (not to mention their talent at a keyboard).That the performers are presented as such — a group of artists sharing Mitchell’s fable rather than embodying it, as they constantly break the fourth wall — also helps to sidestep some of the book’s dated, peak-hippie politics. Venables and Huffman treat the non-Men other as a universal concept that applies, extremely broadly, to anyone oppressed. But a passage that warns against assimilation, of “looking like the Men,” has a narrower focus. Blending in is a distinctly white, gay, bourgeois luxury; not for nothing was Pete Buttigieg the first openly queer person to stand a chance at the American presidency.Yet that contradiction, a dramaturgical wrinkle in an appropriately wrinkled show, is at the heart of queerness as an unfinished project — one still in search of, if not Mitchell’s utopia, then some kind of post-liberation happiness. And that will take time. More

    More stories

    • 113 Shares99 Views

      in Music

      An Opera Partnership’s Next Step: A Fable About Happiness

      by

      George Benjamin and Martin Crimp, who collaborated on modern successes including “Written on Skin,” return with the one-act “Picture a Day Like This.”In one scene of George Benjamin’s new opera “Picture a Day Like This,” which premieres on Wednesday at the Aix-en-Provence Festival in France, a composer and her assistant cut off an interviewer midsentence. The composer asks whether there’s space in her schedule to speak; “five minutes,” the assistant replies.Thankfully, Benjamin had considerably more time to talk when he met with a journalist at his West London home on a sunny Monday in May.If the premiere of “Picture a Day Like This,” written with the playwright Martin Crimp, is highly anticipated, that is because anticipation has long accompanied new works by Benjamin, 63. Initially, for their infrequency — creative block in his early career meant that he produced only a few minutes of music each year — but lately for their critical acclaim.Earlier stage works with Crimp, “Written on Skin” (2012) and “Lessons in Love and Violence” (2018), have quickly entered the repertory of major European opera houses. But it is their first opera, the one-act “Into the Little Hill,” from 2006, that most resembles “Picture a Day Like This,” in its size, duration and subject matter.Indeed, “Picture,” also a one-act, could be paired with “Into the Little Hill,” a retelling of the Pied Piper fairy tale, for a future double bill. Still, “Picture” stands alone, an operatic fable about the pursuit of happiness. It combines two plots, Crimp said in an interview. The first, “The Happy Man’s Shirt,” is an ancient European satire in which a ruler nearing death is told he will be cured if he finds the shirt of a happy man; the only truly happy person he finds, though, is a man too poor to own one. And the second is based a Buddhist story in which a woman goes in search of a miracle to return her infant child from the dead.The hourlong opera, for chamber orchestra and a cast of five, “is a quest, like ‘Alice in Wonderland,’ or Voltaire’s ‘Candide,’” Crimp said. “But it’s a learning structure, if you like, which follows one character from beginning to end, where the encounters are with a variety of new people.”Marianne Crebassa, left, and John Brancy in a rehearsal for the new opera, a fablelike one-act.Jean-Louis FernandezCompared with their previous operas, which have rotated around a fixed point or situation, “Picture,” Crimp said, has “a kind of linear, sequential propulsion.” It follows a mother, whose child has died, on a quest to find the button from the sleeve of a happy person’s shirt (which will secure the child’s return); along the way, she meets a variety of flawed characters.“Within a structure like that, variety is very important,” Crimp said, adding that early discussions with Benjamin about the opera “gave him the license to experiment with very different tones and moods through the different encounters.”Accordingly, Benjamin said, the work “is like a series of bubbles” that the woman walks through. With no precedent or consequence to each moment, and without cumulative material to refer to or push forward, every scene change left him feeling like he “was starting a new piece almost entirely.”A solution was inspired by Vladimir Nabokov — whose writing fixated Benjamin as he composed “Picture” — and his mosaic-like approach. An idea would arrive fully formed in Nabokov’s head, but realizing it on paper would involve jumping around the structure of the piece. “He would write something that ended up on page 238, followed by something for page 5, something for page 15,” Benjamin said. “Bit by bit, these things would fuse from different angles, and suddenly the seamless text would be written at the end, but it wasn’t composed like that.”Benjamin’s opera was written with Martin Crimp, whose texts he likes to be challenged by.Violette Franchi for The New York Times“My experience with myself,” he added, “is that it would be a big mistake to start at the beginning.”Benjamin and Crimp are one of the most successful opera partnerships of our time. They were introduced through the musicologist Laurence Dreyfus in 2005, after Benjamin had met dozens of playwrights and film directors with a view toward writing an opera, including Arthur Miller and David Lynch. The composer Harrison Birtwistle encouraged Benjamin to “find the one person with whom it really works, and stick with them.”Crimp, Benjamin said, writes “terrifying, unflinching, and uncompromising plays” that contrast with a man who, when they first met, he found “gentle of nature.” Crimp said that their relationship has continued because they both have “a special respect for the work of the other.” The lines are drawn precisely in their collaboration; they decide on a story, structure and general trajectory, then leave each other to get to it. Benjamin said that Crimp doesn’t email him any drafts; “they just arrive,” he added, “in a brown, A4 envelope suddenly one morning.”At the Aix Festival, “Picture” will be directed by Daniel Jeanneteau and Marie-Christine Soma, who staged the premiere of “Into the Little Hill” in Paris. In their treatment of the story, the woman is trapped in what they called a “mental prison,” in which the characters she meets — two lovers, an artisan and a collector — float in and out of her life.“It’s an adventure of a soul,” Jeanneteau said, adding that the key to the piece is its simplicity.Through simplicity comes banality, a consideration rich with possibility in playwriting but much more difficult in opera. When writing “Into the Little Hill,” Crimp had, at the back of his mind, the idea of incorporating banal language from everyday life, words like electricity, concrete and refrigerator. “Picture,” with its characters’ distinctly contemporary concerns — topics include mattresses, chlorpromazine and lakeside Austrian retreats — steps closer to his goal.“You can flirt with the banal on the edges of a musical work” like “Picture,” Crimp said, “but ultimately, that’s done to prepare the ground to enter into a much deeper metaphysical space.”Benjamin said that he has “always thought of orchestral pieces, even chamber music as a theatrical thing.” Even so, the drastic changes of tone in Crimp’s libretto for “Picture” have brought a new, dramatic volatility to his operatic writing.“I think he enjoys challenging me, you know: ‘You haven’t done this before, this will be hard, let’s see what you can do,’” Benjamin said of Crimp. “And I like that.” More

    • 100 Shares99 Views

      in Music

      Review: An Opera’s Exquisite Brutality Arrives in America

      by

      George Benjamin and Martin Crimp’s “Lessons in Love and Violence” is a masterly follow-up to their acclaimed “Written on Skin.”LENOX, Mass. — The problem with “Lessons in Love and Violence” has always been that it is not “Written on Skin.”“Skin,” George Benjamin’s unflinchingly savage second opera with the librettist Martin Crimp, was hailed as a landmark at its premiere at the Aix-en-Provence Festival in 2012. Its stature has only grown since, and it’s a routine choice as one of the great operas of the century so far.Benjamin and Crimp stuck to their template for the gruesome “Lessons,” the successor piece that was more coolly received after its debut in London in 2018 and that received its American premiere on Monday night at Ozawa Hall here, with the composer leading the youngsters of the Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra in dagger-sharp support of an incisive cast of current and past Tanglewood vocal fellows.Like “Skin,” “Lessons” has a dense, historically contrived libretto, offering a callous plot that hacks away at any sentimentality you might have left about power or love. There is music that seethes and soothes — its every last, creepy twang of a cimbalom or bludgeon of brass conceived and executed with flawless clarity of gesture and precision of timbre.Yet somehow this jewel-studded, velvet-wrapped mace of a score never once feels too deliberately methodical or sounds anything but fully alive. Its imposing rigor scalds in the heat of the murderous moment.Listen to it, and you might ask yourself which of these two unsparing operas is supposed to be Benjamin’s masterpiece. For if “Skin” disappeared, “Lessons” would be sufficient to anoint its composer all on its own.The operas are similar, but “Lessons” is no mere reproduction of its predecessor. It abandons the metahistorical flourishes of the earlier work, focusing on the story at hand rather than creating a superstructure of characters to drag it into the present. Despite the medieval setting, the core conceit of a prince receiving (dubious, shall we say) instruction in governance from the machinations of his parents — the King and his wife, Isabel — and their scheming courtier-lovers, Gaveston and Mortimer, has a Machiavellian timelessness to it.“Don’t bore me with the price of bread,” the King sings when Mortimer confronts him with the ruin that his favor for Gaveston has unleashed on the body politic. “There is no connection between our music and your labor,” Isabel assures the impoverished supplicants who demand an end to entertainments whose costs could pay their wages for a year. Not for nothing did the concert performance here, instinctively acted behind music stands though it was, take on the morality tale feel of an oratorio.However revealing the unstaged approach might be, it’s regrettable that “Lessons” had its premiere like this. How is it possible, one has to ask, that the first American performance of such a major work should be entrusted to a group of summer-school attendees for one sparsely attended night only — a Monday, no less — in the Berkshires?The Lyric Opera of Chicago is one of seven co-commissioners of “Lessons,” but there is still no sign of it mounting Katie Mitchell’s original staging, which it had to postpone in 2020. In the absence of a major house taking up “Skin,” the Mostly Mozart Festival in New York, at its bravest, gave that work its staged premiere in 2015, but that festival is no more.It is to Tanglewood’s immense credit that it has taken the initiative, pushing its fellows to their limit at the end of the annual Festival of Contemporary Music and building on the long, close relationship that the Boston Symphony Orchestra has enjoyed with Benjamin, who led “Skin” in its quickly mounted American debut here in 2013 and followed it with a song cycle, “Dream of the Song,” in 2016.And you would be glad, though gladdening this opera is not, to hear a performance as strong as Monday’s in any major house. Three of the main parts were taken by recent graduates of Tanglewood’s vocal program; greater testament to its worth would be hard to imagine. Nathaniel Sullivan sang the King — Edward II, as imagined by Christopher Marlowe then reimagined by Crimp — with sniveling command, the monarch’s weakness to the fore. Daniel McGrew was eerily believable portraying the soldier-technocrat Mortimer’s earnest association of orderly progress with the necessity of killing, while Dominik Belavy gave Gaveston a deliciously unhinged air.Surely no soprano takes on a role written for Barbara Hannigan without fear, but the current Tanglewood fellow Elizabeth Polese made it seem as if she had as the haughty Isabel. She excelled just as Edmond Rodriguez brought frightening dignity to the Boy who learns his lessons all too well, chillingly scheduling the execution of Mortimer after the general has installed him on the throne. Meredith Wohlgemuth, Claire McCahan and Jack Canfield acquitted themselves well in smaller roles.But the orchestra was the star. Benjamin conducted it with his customary, graceful efficiency. Short of Alban Berg, few composers have been able to make abject brutality sound so exquisite, even so tender as Benjamin does here, his use of silence as intentional as his careful etching of textures around the voices.There is an unerring flow to “Lessons”: Several of its seven short scenes echo one another; interludes link them, commenting on and even extending the action; and the odd leitmotif pokes through, most noticeably the braying trombones that announce the King and that reappear, with mutes, when his son assumes the throne.Yet it is Benjamin’s merciless ability to hunt down the most specific of sounds that makes him such a potent dramatist. A desperately longing solo horn, fraught with desire, plays as Gaveston relates how the King likes to hold his hand over a flame; pawing woodwinds surround a Madman who fatally insists to the Boy that he is the real king, based on testimony from a cat.Gaveston gets the grisliest death of all, nothing like the horrifying tower of dissonance that accompanies the killing of the King, but one that we have to imagine in absentia, as the powerless ruler reads the details of his lover’s death from a letter while a percussionist taps out a rhythm on the rim of a side drum.You might hear in that the loneliness of Gaveston, or the dread of a King confronting the passage of time before his own, sure murder. I heard cockroaches, scurrying around the dead. Either way, what in any other composer’s hands could be predictable, Benjamin makes magical.Lessons in Love and ViolencePerformed on Monday at Ozawa Hall at Tanglewood in Lenox, Mass. More