Soprano Barbara Hannigan is interviewed in Toronto, where she is performing three programs with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, Friday, February 20, 2015.Galit Rodan/The Globe and Mail
British composer George Benjamin and Canadian soprano Barbara Hannigan ended their week-long residency with the Toronto Symphony's New Creations Festival Saturday night with an overpowering performance of Benjanmin's 2012 opera Written on Skin. For 90 harrowing minutes on the Roy Thomson Hall stage, even in a concert version, the strength of Benjamin's music and Martin Crimp's libretto was convincing proof that contemporary music is ready to take its place in the "regular" world of artistic achievement. If there's one opera of the last 20 years that deserves to enter the standard repertoire, Written on Skin may well be it.
What's interesting about the music that Benjamin has written for his opera is that it is thoroughly and completely modern, but perfectly understandable at the same time. The magic by which he worked this substantial miracle was masterful. The opera begins with a cacophonous twist of rising winds and brass – a familiar modernist gesture – but hardly ever again strays into anything resembling conventional "modern" music. Instead, Benjamin creates moment after moment, tableau after tableau of original sonorities, musical lines and textures, each perfectly illuminating and inhabiting the dramatic scene they are designed to exploit. And such beautiful sounds Benjamin has concocted for this opera – a glass harmonica playing opposite a viola da gamba; bongos intertwined with winds; a bass drum perfectly mimicking a heartbeat.
Written on Skin is loosely based on a medieval troubadour story about a man who discovers his wife's lover, kills him and forces her to eat his heart. But in Martin Crimp's layered and evocative libretto (which deserves just as much praise as Benjamin's score), this story is equally given a feminist, Biblical and quasi-Marxist spin, with visitations from Walter Benjamin's Angel of History and postmodern critiques of the emptiness of contemporary life equally at home. In the end, it's basically an Edenic story – the story of Eve told from a new perspective, where her temptations of both her husband and her lover are in the pursuit of her own self-fulfillment, her need to become a full human. Crimp's libtretto is at the same time both extremely layered and extremely simple, poetic and terse in equal measure. Along with Benjamin's superbly crafted musical tableau, Written on Skin often resembles the highly stylized art of the illuminated manuscripts which feature so prominently in the opera's story (The husband in the piece, "the Protector" has hired a "Boy" to create an illuminated book praising his life and works: it is only when the Boy creates a page cataloging his affair with the Protector's wife that things turn violent).
George Benjamin created the role of Agnes, the protector's wife, specifically for Barbara Hannigan who premiered it, tailoring the role to the strengths of her range and expressive repertoire. And Hannigan performed it beautifully, utilizing her crystalline coloratura register to powerful effect. Christopher Purves, another original cast member was equally as effective, if not more so, as the Protector, at once haughty, malevolent, tortured, brutal, cold. Purves has clearly played this role often and it has seeped directly into his own skin, it seems. Bernhard Landauer was powerful as the Boy, and Isaiah Bell and Krisztina Szabo filled out the cast with real zest.
A concert version of an opera (with minimal staging) can sometimes cause artistic problems because it reverses the visual field of a staged piece, forcing us to concentrate on the usually invisible orchestra and consequently lose our tight focus on the actor/performers. To Written on Skin's credit, this never became a serious problem, and even turned into a plus. Watching Benjamin himself on the podium coax his music from a beautifully balanced TSO was an added benefit that capped an almost perfect evening in the embrace of the mystery of music.