Imma, Dublin
GERALD BARRY'S The Intelligence Parkis a challenging opera. Vincent Deane's libretto alone makes sure of that. The 18th-century style of the language, generously intercut with Italian, has a richness of layering that would make it difficult to follow even as a spoken text.
The work is set in Dublin in 1753. The plot, which traces a creative and sexual crisis, involves a play within a play, but one which takes place in the mind of one of the characters.
It’s the fate of the unfortunate composer Robert Paradies to envision two of the other characters (his betrothed Jerusha Cramer and the castrato Serafino, with whom he has become obsessed) transmuted into the enchantress Daub and the warrior Wattle and, forgive the pun, to lose the plot to the point where he can’t distinguish between the real world and a fantasy he can no longer control.
Barry’s often riotously energetic music splays everything in its path – voices, words, instruments, expectations. If there’s another opera that pushes male voices so often into falsetto, I haven’t heard it.
Barry also delights in implausible-sounding leaps from those feathery regions into the gravity-recognising weight of normal singing.
On the one hand, the melodic and harmonic style engages in any amount of relentlessly speedy dislocation, so that the performers would seem to need some kind of musical seven-league boots to have any hope of staying on track.
On the other, the music is also shot through with slivers of the fleetingly familiar, while there are also moments which flower into traditional lyricism.
The work made quite a splash when it was directed by David Fielding at the Almeida Festival in London in 1990, in a production that also made its way to Dublin for a run at the Gate Theatre, but no company has dared to take it up since.
Its first 21st-century airing, in a concert performance by the Crash Ensemble under Richard Baker, came at the Irish Museum of Modern Art on Wednesday as part the museum’s 20th-birthday celebrations.
Bass Stephen Richardson’s Sir Joshua Cramer, the one carryover from 1990, was sanity-defyingly manic, the singer throwing himself at the extremes of volume and range with a vigour that you would almost expect to threaten his vocal health.
Tenor John Daszak’s commandingly poised Henri D’Esperaudieu gave the character a properly distanced perspective over the sensitive fluctuations of his friend Paradies (the baritone Roderick Williams).
Soprano Sarah Gabriel’s flighty Jerusha flew freely into and around the vocal stratosphere, and counter-tenor Andrew Watts presented a full-on Serafino of real vocal fibre. Mezzo soprano Loré Lixenberg brought agility and mystery as Serafino’s companion Faranesi, and the boy soprano Gavin Jones sang his short contributions with penetrating purity.
In short, vocally and instrumentally, everything sounded altogether more cultured than I remember from 1990. And, with the audience on tiered seating, the acoustic of Imma’s Great Hall brought bass richness and tonal glows that are always hard to secure in the drier surroundings of a theatre.
