THE ARTS: A gloomy cricket, a Tchaikovsky cabaret and a soldier trucking with the devil - Michael Dervan reports from Suffolk's Aldeburgh Festival
The two central characters of Richard Ayres's new opera The Cricket Recovers, which was premiered at the Aldeburgh Festival last weekend, are a cricket suffering inexplicably from gloom and an elephant burdened with an irresistible need to climb trees.
The opera is based on stories by the Dutch writer Toon Tellegen, the 18 scenes of Rozalie Hirs's libretto translated into English by John Irons.
Tellegen is a man prepared to take fairy-tale liberties to present what Ayres clearly regards as a hyper-reality that reinforces home truths.
"These days," the composer once told an interviewer, "I try to allow myself the courage to let the music roam - if I wake up tomorrow and it appears there should be a herd of elephants running across the string quartet, they will appear." In its nonchalant extravagance of both music and action, The Cricket Recovers - and, yes, the cricket does recover - is just the sort of work to appeal to the child in us all, and the adult, too.
Ayres is a musical pirate. He treats all of musical history, real and imagined, as a time present to be plundered. The plundering is blatant enough to be part of the fun, and can result in the listener experiencing stylistic lurches like the fluctuating G-force of a Formula 1 race.
Constant Lambert once made a famous jibe about Stravinsky being like a savage, standing in delighted awe in front of a top hat and a chamber pot, two symbols of an alien civilisation whose functions he was apt to confuse. Lambert would have had to find an altogether higher level of hyperbole to accommodate the stretchings and stutterings of a musical imagination like Ayres's that seems as genuinely naive as it is sophisticated - idiot savant allied to probing analyst.
Fantasy operas are notoriously challenging to produce. The designs by the Quay Brothers, the often animated direction by Nicholas Broadhurst, and the invigorating playing of the Almeida Ensemble under Roland Kluttig strike just the right note.
Elephant (Jonathan Gunthorpe) climbs and climbs and falls and falls with endearing tenacity in a heavy-duty, hose-trailing diving suit. Vole (Allison Bell) delivers hair-raising coloratura as a speedy, ground-hugging, schoolgirl tricyclist doing brake-turns. The often-bemused Cricket (Claire Wild) is a sporty, helmeted, knee-padded, bike-less cyclist whose gloomy feeling is eventually spotted and physically extracted by the observant Squirrel (Joanna Burton). All co-exist with Ant and Owl (both Anna Burford), Sparrow (Simon Butteriss) and gruesome Gallworm (Keith Miller) in a crooked, shadowy world, where nothing can be guaranteed to be quite what it seems.
Although there is some flagging caused by the short scene structure, the moment-by-moment appeal of the work is high, and a wider audience will get a chance to hear it when it transfers to the Almeida Theatre in London.
The festival's artistic director, Thomas Adès, conducted the Northern Sinfonia in a beautifully levitated performance of what is one of Gerald Barry's strangest pieces, L'Agitation des Observateurs, Le Tremblement des Voyeurs. Adès's careful internal balancing of self-similar patterns - like a series of brush strokes, with a single, pronounced dividing line of silence - did not dispel the music's sense of enigma, and the performance that stood out in this concert was a robustly good-humoured account of Beethoven's Fourth Symphony.
I wasn't able to stay long enough in Aldeburgh to hear festival performances by two Irish singers, soprano Ailish Tynan and tenor Robin Tritschler. But I did catch appearances by Belfast violinist Darragh Morgan. He coached and led the Britten-Pears Orchestra, whose playing under Alexander Polianichko had an excitingly rough edge, but was wanting in subtlety.
And he appeared in a late-night "Tchaikovsky Cabaret" with pianists Thomas Adès, Catherine Edwards and Huw Watkins, the show (a sequence of Russian-related miniatures and rarities) being unfortunately stolen by Adès, whose blue rubber-gloved handling of György Kurtág's cluster-pounded re-working of Tchaikovsky's First Piano Concerto left the piano with dead notes in the extreme treble - a substitute had to be wheeled on.
Lawrence Evans's new production of Stravinsky's The Soldier's Tale with players from the Academy of St Martin in the Fields (on tour around the UK following its Aldeburgh premiere) casts a real violinist in the role of the Soldier who trucks with the Devil and puts a real violin into his hands at key moments. The incoming artistic director of the Irish Chamber Orchestra, Anthony Marwood, showed fine acting skills and sharp-edged playing, to boot.
Marwood and Adès also gave an afternoon programme of Stravinsky's music for violin and piano. Most of this is in the form of arrangements from the composer's performing partnership with Samuel Dushkin, and is not what you would call grateful - the demands on the performers far outweigh the likely rewards for the listeners. Adès worked wonders at the piano (Benjamin Britten's personal concert grand), and Marwood did, too, but only when he finally got off the fence of his classical poise, in the arrangements from Mavra, The Fairy's Kiss and Petrushka.
French pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard offered scintillating sharp edges in the youthful First Piano Sonata by Pierre Boulez, a work which, like it or loathe it, marked an important turning point in European music in 1946. The Aldeburgh audience gave every indication of loving it.
Czech mezzo soprano Magdalena Kozená ravished the senses in a recital of Ravel, Britten, Strauss and Shostakovich with Malcolm Martineau. She has one of the most beautiful voices before the public today and uses it with consistent intelligence and cool control, favouring a delivery which often seems artless but has a refinement which shows it never is.
She gauges to perfection her moments of explosive release, which are all the more shocking for the easefulness of their surroundings. The black, black humour of Shostakovich's Satires, Op. 109, showed her at her best, appearing to step outside of her well-mannered persona, but still actually living fully persuasively within it.
