Tippett’s selective, often compelling and mostly well-structured take on Trojan War myths will never capture the wider public’s imagination as much as even the least of Britten’s operas. His ideas sometimes pierce the soul but don’t stick there in the same way, and the human interest level never goes so deep. The sounds, though, are something else: a splintering of interest groups, or even a single instrument, to flank each character.
We ought to be gripped by the selective clusters from the opening trumpet fanfares – “heralds before the curtain” – and yowling offstage chorus. James Conway’s production opens not with the fireworks I expected, but with a whimper: brass at the back of the stage, onstage chorus blocking them. It’s the first of many blunders in an almost relentlessly clumsy piece of stagecraft.
What would I do? Keep the chorus - and ETO's is superb - in the wings when the original stage directions say so, strike Anna Fleischle’s ungainly set, bring the instrumentalists down to share a third of a bare performing space with the singers, as they did in the Linbury production of Gerald Barry’s dazzling The Importance of Being Earnest, and there’d still be more space for movement.
The costumes - all feathers, silly hats and warpaint, as in a bad Star Trek episode - give as much cause for mirth as some of the lines in the libretto. Tippett’s own, it isn’t bad for the most part, but observations like “life is a bitter charade”, with the orginal extra syllable on the ‘-de’ now dropped, occasioned a few giggles among younger audience members, especially when repeated in an increasingly knotty trio for the Old Man (Andrew Slater), Nurse to the baby Paris (Clarissa Meek) and the Young Guard who carries him away to safety (Adam Tunnicliffe). These three have an especially thankless choric task in Tippett’s larger scheme of showing the mystery in human choice.
Is that really all it’s about – Priam’s wavering to kill the son the seer tells him will be his death, the resurgent, grown Paris’s choice to go with Helen and give the golden apple to her double Aphrodite (the judgment scene pictured right)? I don’t know and, given Tippett’s schematic characterizations, I didn’t often care. And I don’t want to be told to “feel the pity and the terror” of war if the music, for all its harsh ingenuity, doesn’t make me do so.
The vocal phrases are too relentlessly declamatory, in any case. They seemed to be defeating the Priam of Roderick Earle – either exhausted or under the weather (I hate to say it can only get worse as the run progresses). They give promising heroic tenor Charne Rochford a hell of a time as Achilles sits in his tent not so much musing as hollering about his homeland, soulful as the accompanying guitar undoubtedly is. I haven't heard a more uncomfortable rant since Helen Field’s awful Mother in Poul Ruders’ The Handmaid’s Tale at English National Opera.
The rest of the cast deals incredibly well both in synchronising with conductor Michael Rosewell and his invisible orchestra - Iain Farrington has given them a reduced instrumentation, though as Tippett's original is so spare, it rarely shows - and in embracing the taxing, tiring lines. Lyric tenor Nicholas Sharratt committed his familiar musicality to the sheer intensity of febrile Paris; he’s a perfectly fine looking chap, but Tippett the librettist should have known better than to advertise him as “the most beautiful man alive". Paris’s childhood incarnation was impeccably well taken by treble Thomas Delgado-Little, keenly tabbed by oboist Louise Hayter. Grant Doyle kept decent Hector on the boil despite headgear the daftness of which was only matched by Adrian Dwyer’s Hermes. Perhaps if Dwyer had sung a little more softly when the messenger of death waxes lyrical over "divine music", we might have believed it, for just a flute and a harp do not sublimity make if the substance isn’t transcendent.
Best of all were the women – edgy Hecuba/Athene (strong soprano Laure Meloy) with a solo violin for support as too often (Tippett wanted the full ensemble), seductive cipher Helen/Aphrodite (Niamh Kelly) and above all the most compelling presence and voice in a mostly strong cast, Camilla Roberts as Andromache (pictured above). Unfortunately the ladies' ritual return before Priam’s too long postponed death only highlighted the drama’s dying spasms, and the final inevitable demise was weak.
Yet so it is in Tippett’s work too, and though the opera has had more propulsive advocates in David Atherton’s dream cast recording and Nicholas Hytner’s more focused Kent Opera production happily still on DVD, you can’t help remembering that Britten’s War Requiem appeared in the Coventry Festival alongside King Priam back in 1962. The great was the enemy of the good then; so it remains with the passing of time. And there's pity and terror for you.