NEW DARK AGE (Royal Opera)****

 

By Louise

Link: https://stream.roh.org.uk/packages/new-dark-age/videos/new-dark-age-part-2 (it says Part 2 but the whole performance is here) £10 including tax

Available until: Monday 23^rd November 2020

New Dark Ages is made up of several works, divided into two halves. The first hour of the performance is the chamber opera The Knife of Dawn, composed by Hannah Kendall to a libretto by Tessa McWatt, with poems by Martin Carter. Martin Carter is played by singer Martin Braithwaite, who carries the whole opera almost on his own.

It’s based on a really sad – and true - story. Martin Carter lived in Guyana, which had just become independent. They were trying to create a new country for themselves, but instead, the new Government found itself disbanded by the British with several members put into prison without charge. (There is a longer explanation at the start of the opera.) The opera tells the story of Martin Carter’s time in prison.

The opera is very poignant and beautiful. It is quite difficult to watch because it’s so sad, but it’s so beautiful, I sometimes found myself enjoying it. Then I felt guilty for enjoying it because this is the suffering of a real person. It made me think about what art really is (though I’m not really sure of the answer to that)

Ola Ince’s direction is very interesting. The perspective keeps changing. Sometimes the character of Martin seems to be = in a very small space which shows that he is trapped in his situation. At other times, he seems like a very small figure in a very large space, which shows how vulnerable he is. There are some lovely effects created by Akhila Krishnan and Max Spielbichler’s video designs, and Imogen Knight’s music direction makes the piece seem part-ballet.

The opera mostly has a very modern sound, but the voices heard by Martin Carter often sound like early music. The voices of Nia Coleman, Sarah Dacey and Beth Moxon blend really beautifully together. Jonathon Heyward conducts the ROH orchestra (but not the full orchestra) with a flowing, dreamlike sort of effect which sometimes went into nightmares. The dreamlike quality helps with the feeling that what is happening can’t be real because it’s too horrible and then it hits you again that it is real. It’s real for the character and it was real for an actual person too.

The second half of the concert was called A New Dark Age and there were several pieces by Missy Mazzoli, Anna Meredith and Anna Thorvaldsdottir. Each composer has contributed two or three pieces. Some have singers and some don’t. Some have text written by Matthew Zapruder. One has words by Philip Ridley, who is probably the same man who wrote the monologue which Cal is reviewing today. Some are entirely orchestral. All of them are directed by Katie Mitchell and conducted by Natalie Murray Beale.

The singers are Nadine Benjamin, former Jette Parker Young Artist Anna Dennis and Susan Bickley. The ensemble includes Nia Coleman and Beth Moxon, who sang in the first half, and William Gaunt, who played Theseus in the A Midsummer Night’s Dream sections of The Fairy Queen at Glyndebourne. It’s nice seeing the same people in new places.

In New Ages, the three soloists are on the bare stage. Behind them are films of the same singers walking around a house and going out. We see other people in their masks, but it’s not as crowded as we might expect. Masks are very symbolic. The singers only remove them when they have to sing and they put them back on if they’re not singing for a while.

The music is continuous so it’s difficult to know where one composer’s work ends and the next begins. A change in the style of the music could mean a new composer or it could mean the composer has started writing in a different style. I could probably work it out if I went through it carefully and worked out which bits have words and which bits are orchestral, but it was all put together for a reason. It’s all meshed together and it works.

It feels a bit like we lose some of our identity when we wear a mask because so much of our face is covered. We don’t look like we usually do and we look more like everyone else. So maybe that is symbolised with the music all being merged together, like each composer doesn’t quite have their own identity in the same way because you can’t tell where one work ends and the next begins. But maybe I’m wrong. Maybe it is very obvious to everyone else.

The whole evening is really beautiful musically and although it isn’t a happy evening, I think it’s a really special and important one, which is relevant to lots of the issues which we’ve been thinking about over the past few months.