Christmas feels long gone by now, but it was, as ever, a time when past and present collide. Musically, they did so with some force when I heard, in the space of a single week, two very different Christmas oratorios: the venerable one we know and love by Bach, and a modern counterpart by that most eminent of living Catholic composers, James MacMillan.
The Bach had a gold-standard performance at London’s Smith Square from the elite professional choir Polyphony, and was a joy. MacMillan’s Christmas Oratorio was not quite so easy to sum up. From simple, almost childlike elements suggestive of the tenderness of the Nativity story, it built into a sweeping Cecil B DeMille-type vision of the potency of the Incarnation – heavy with biblical awe of a kind that MacMillan knows how to deliver and that, saving the decorum of the concert hall, would force you to your knees.
Performed by the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, with MacMillan himself conducting, it struck me as one of the most significant large-scale religious works of our times. Not quite a masterpiece – it is over-long – it nonetheless stands out in what has become an unattractive genre for composers. Oratorios seem time-stopped. MacMillan’s opens up the possibility that they might not be.
Something else that seems time-stopped these days is the ability of small-scale touring companies to make opera available beyond big cities. One example is Mid Wales Opera, which lost most of its public funding some time ago and looked close to collapse. By a miracle – which is not too big a word – it has survived, albeit in straitened circumstances. Over the past winter it was touring a small production of Leonard Bernstein’s Trouble in Tahiti to venues across Wales that would otherwise not experience live opera from one year to the next.
I saw it in the border town of Presteigne, where it was staged in the local parish church. I was dumbfounded by the brilliance with which MWO, in these unlikely circumstances and starved of resources, managed to conjure up the spirit of 1950s American suburbia – which is what Trouble in Tahiti is about.
Written just before West Side Story, and inhabiting something of the same Broadway-into-opera sound world, Tahiti presents a married couple ostensibly living the American post-war dream but actually struggling to keep their relationship afloat. Compact but forceful, it lasts under an hour and requires a cast of only five. Yet that is enough to make a perfect miniature – as Bernstein later proved when he enlarged the piece into a full-length opera (A Quiet Place) that extends the story but feels overloaded and unnecessary. Tahiti needed no extension.
This little Welsh production, smartly directed by Richard Studer and dynamically conducted by Jon Lyness, was completely satisfying. It was also a message to those who fund the arts in Wales of what they stand to lose if enterprises like MWO are not supported.
Happily, the Oxford Philharmonic Orchestra does not have that problem – although its support is largely private, and a mark of how adept the OPO is at fund-raising. As a result, it supplies its home city with glamorous concerts and soloists of a stature rarely seen in Oxford when I was a student there, with stars such as Maxim Vengerov and Anne-Sophie Mutter turning up almost routinely.
When Lucy Crowe pulled out of an OPO performance of Strauss’s Four Last Songs at Oxford’s Sheldonian Theatre the other month, her announced replacement was no less than Miah Persson, one of the leading Strauss sopranos of today. When Persson then fell indisposed – it was winter bug season – we got Elisabeth Llewellyn: not quite in the same league, though still a catch for a last-minute substitute. How the OPO pulls such rabbits out of hats I have no idea. But it is a lesson to the rest.
Stephen Sondheim was always adamant that he wrote musicals, not operas. But given the complexity and substance of his output, ‘opera’ is not a misnomer; and there is no Sondheim more complex than Into the Woods, which has been playing in a new production at London’s Bridge Theatre. The piece interweaves familiar fairy tales with characters in search of happy-ever-after endings; by the conclusion of Act One, they seem to have succeeded.
But as Sondheim-lovers (and I am one) appreciate, he does not do straightforward happy endings. His abiding lesson is that life is a messy work in progress, and his curtains fall on people still endeavouring to sort it out, supported by whatever crumbs of wisdom they have picked up en route.
To this extent, Woods is a pilgrimage in song: wise, sad, funny and joyous, with the chance that you might just emerge from it a better human being. The whole cast in this production work their socks off to make something of the kind a possibility. You leave the theatre feeling perhaps slightly closer to an understanding of how best to live than when you entered it – no small achievement for a musical.