<<  -- 6 --  Roderic Dunnett    FEMALE INSURGENCE

Thompson's Zivný, a composer struggling with his artist's credo as much as surely as Pfitzner's Palestrina, Schreker's Fritz or Hindemith's painter Mathis, is remarkably contrasted with this hectic activity. A bewitching bassoon link (there is another in Act III), then top notch woodwind chorus, ushered him in. The slightly bulky Thompson cuts as curious a figure visually onstage as the ubiquitous Matthew Best, and despite a lovely lyric voice -- he is a nonpareil interpreter of English song -- inclines to bleat somewhat. Yet somehow this performance -- his Zivný seemed as alienated as Tchaikovsky's Hermann -- encompassed it all : edgy and cutting, yet also lyric, anti-heroic yet somehow clumsily heroic.

The music is simply wonderful : the glow of late Romanticism runs throughout : as a student in Vienna Janácek turned against Wagner, yet the score contains at least one Act I apotheosis (to Mila's extended monologue, nursed by solo horn, 'I lived so near you in a world of dreams' -- 'Já v jejuím sumu ztrácela se s tebou' (in Garsington's considerate parallel text libretto) that could be Götterdämmerung and an Act III tryst that is pure Tristan. Bruno Poet's lighting plot for the sinister collapse of the always striking contralto Susan Gorton (aptly grim as Mila's mother; she was equally grim as the old woman in Welsh National Opera's landmark The Queen of Spades) was one of several effective visual coups. Gorton's Act II explosion ('Fate ! Our hearts are conflicting echoes'), together with the singing of the boy Doubek, Mila and Zivný's son -- 'Mami! Vis co je láska?') 'Mummy, do you know what love is?' (treble Matthew Clarke alternating with Augustine Glazov, cannily avoiding family outbursts by hiding under the grand piano) -- proved two of the most affecting moments in the show.

The Act III's students' scene, all grouped round the Conservatoire piano, positively burst into life : they are looking forward to the completion and première of Zivný's new opera, whose autobiographical content gradually dawns on them; the child's question now forms part of the opera. The brouhaha is cut short by fateful Tchaikovskian clarinets and the forceful intervention of Hrazda (Lorenzo Carola). This is expressionist plotting at its finest -- sharp, pithy, irony-ridden. Olivia Fuchs's direction of the chorus and the (now student age) son, ably sung by Mark Dobell, and further supported by Poet's lighting, was astonishingly imaginative and detailed.

Zivný is unable to finish his opera : the aptly named Poet's shifting, circling grey-white light and Fuchs's circular placing of the students not only caught the curious ritual feel of this last act build-up splendidly : its conscious echoes of the earlier evening's staging of Sárka gave the whole evening a cyclic feel. Thompson's Zivný, yearning after 'distant sounds' in almost a presaging of Schreker's later opera Der Ferne Klang, has virtually a Liebestod to himself, and Elgar Howarth's young Guildhall Strings, together with their brass and woodwind colleagues, did this sumptuous score ample justice, right to the final flicker of a dying solo string.