Birtwhistle: The Minotaur, Royal Opera House, 22.04.08

The 3rd performance at the Royal Opera House, cond. Antonio Pappano

The opera opens with a darkly dreaming and yearning passage in the orchestra which was convincingly tense and laden with expectation. A projection of heaving sea swell serves as a periodic reminder of the Minotaur's father, the sea-god Poseidon. The music brilliantly captures the plangent tones of heavy seas. Ariadne (Christine Rice) is walking along a strip of beach and greets the Innocents to Crete as they arrive on a ship under a black sail; they will be sacrificed to the Minotaur. Rice's part was sung mainly along a narrow band of sand near the front of the circular stage. She must choose the first to go in to the Minotaur; but forbids Theseus, who has come to kill the Minotaur, from going in.

The Innocents descend into the labyrinth - the 'cage without a key' - and their terrified cries ring through the labyrinth. They eventually find their way to the Minotaur (John Tomlinson) in a parodied bull ring lined by a jeering chorus flanked by two timpanists punctuating their calls for blood with drum rolls and pounding thuds. The innocents are killed one by one - the Keres, raven-like one-winged women come, drawn to the slaughter, to claim their souls. I felt that the Keres parts were over-acted. Their cries were a little like something you could hear in a pantomime, but their costumes were very effective.

Meanwhile, slaughter makes the beast sleepy, and in dreams he sees himself in a mirror, with his sister and another figure beside him. A recorded voice over intones fragments of meaning which he tries to decipher, tormented by his half-man, half-beast state. In these passages of disturbed and worried sleep, are some of the finest moments of the opera; the Minotaur becomes a more human figure, with worries and torments and emotions which are unexpected.

Eventually, Ariadne finds a way for Theseus to go in to the Minotaur and return if he can kill the beast. She gives him a ball of string and a dagger, after forcing him to promise to take her back to Athens as his bride. Unrelentingly bleak, the point of the opera was not to celebrate the killing of this beast conceived in shame (Ariadne and the Minotaur respectively sing of the shame of their mother giving birth to a monster), but to mourn his conception and damned existence in the cage without a key.

The death scene, again in the parodied bull ring, is relatively straightforward, and the opera closes as one of the Keres comes to reclaim the Minotaur's soul, with another grandiose cry which was more pantomime than opera.

Previously, the only Birtwistle opera I had heard was Punch and Judy, which was premièred decades ago. I would say this is not the kind of music that I would normally choose to listen to. An absence of hummable tunes can put some people off - at least two people left the auditorium during part one, and several sitting near me did not return for part two. But despite this, I found The Minotaur quite musically accessible, with enough repeated and imitated motifs to gain a musical foothold and I began to feel the inevitability of some phrases and the direction of the tonalities. This was also a story well told; it is always a good sign when you are waiting with expectation to hear the next part of a story you know well.

Overall this was an enjoyable evening, absorbing, if very bleak, as I mentioned before. For those able to sit through the ninety minutes of part one, the terser part two will provide a good reward both musically and theatrically.

****