Welsh National Opera used to tailor letters to members of their mailing list based on what they had booked for in the past. I can see them writing to me: ‘Dear Dr Knight, We see that you have a liking for harrowing operas ….’. After going to Wozzeck and Mazeppa it was time to see James MacMillan’s new opera at the Bristol Hippodrome. (I noticed some similarity of plot to Mazeppa; a woman married to her father’s political enemy, rejecting another man who remains around to cause trouble.)
It was well attended, including several members of the Exultate Singers, with whom I sang MacMillan’s Canticos Sagrados a while back; we compared notes afterwards over a drink.
This opera got mixed reviews, and overall I was in favour of it. I had my usual reaction to MacMillan’s music, which is that I can appreciate it but I’m not overwhelmed by it as a listener in the way I know some people are. I went to his other Mabinogion-inspired work, The Birds of Rhiannon, at the Proms a few years ago, but don’t remember enough about it to make a comparison. The vocal writing here was rather different to that in his sacred music, without the characteristic twiddles of the latter (though I’m not sure MacMillan himself recognises much of a division between sacred and secular). The scoring used brass heavily.
I found the plot coherent enough, although the attempt to work the Mabinogion legend into the final stages of it was rather contrived. I think we will get another production before long, and only then will it be really really to judge its worth. Not because the performances for WNO were inadequate (they weren’t), but because we need to see how well it works with different approaches and casts.