Review: Into the Little Hill and Down by the Greenwood Side
March 9, 2009
Date reviewed: 7 March 2009
Venue: Howard Assembly Room
This double bill of Harrison Birtwistle’s Down by the Greenwood Side and George Benjamin’s Into the Little Hill, a joint production by the Opera Group and London Sinfonietta, was first staged at the Royal Opera House’s Linbury Studio Theatre in February and the Leeds performances complete a short tour.
Down by the Greenwood Side, dating from 1969, is a robust piece of music theatre, violent and comic in equal measure, to a script by Michael Nyman that incorporates the Childe ballad, ‘The Cruel Mother’, and the traditional Mummers’ play of St George. John Fulljames’ imaginative and entertaining production re-casts Mrs Green, the cruel mother, as a bag lady and presents the central fight as between a kung fu St George and a skinhead Bold Slasher.
In the only singing part Claire Booth movingly projects Mrs Green’s tortured vocal lines while Pip Donaghy’s Father Christmas, simultaneously bemused and authoritative, leads a quartet of ne’er-do-wells through a sequence of instant amputations, decapitation, resuscitation and brutal murder. Under George Benjamin (conducting both pieces) the nine-piece band ratchets up both tension and humour with inventive percussion and woodwind sounds stretched across the range from piccolo to contrabassoon, as well as incurring Father Christmas’ wrath for drowning out his opening speech!
Into the Little Hill is a subtler piece. Though the orchestra doubles in size (with such unlikely instruments as basset horn and banjo), it is frequently used more sparingly, the final deep chord resonating slowly into silence typical of Benjamin’s writing. Based closely on the Pied Piper story, it replaces the good burghers of Hamelin with a minister seeking re-election: the rat extermination becomes a blatant appeal to the prejudice of the electorate, whilst the children’s sympathy can encompass both rats and the dark world inside the little hill. The story is told by two singers, soprano and mezzo-soprano, not becoming characters so much as assuming roles, both male and female.
Martin Crimp’s libretto is simple and spare, highly metaphorical and emotionally charged, with a nice ear for the hypocrisy of office: the Minister’s Wife assures her child that the rats will die “with dignity”. Benjamin’s music is at its most lyrical at the Stranger’s first appearance and, despite explosions from brass and percussion, favours the mysterious over the overtly dramatic, with a highly effective use of the cimbalom to create tension and a sense of otherness in the Minister-Stranger dialogues.
Beginning with the vengeful Crowd chorus (hints of Bach Passions), both Susan Bickley and Claire Booth give compelling vocal performances, their intensity increased by the intimacy of the venue. With little action and even, in the case of the Minister’s meeting with the Stranger, no eye contact, the drama is all contained in the vocal characterisation. Helped by Benjamin’s transparent word-setting and the excellent acoustic, both get every word of the text across to the audience.
However, this first opera production in the Howard Assembly Room also exposes the limitations of the venue. It’s not a theatre, with wings or flying space, and the set change that turned the pit and ladder set of Down by the Greenwood Side into the series of upright circles required for Into the Little Hill took so long on the first night that the interval, at 45 minutes, proved the longest item on the programme! Ironically the main use of the largest circle is to project a selection of the words, useful for extra emphasis, but not really necessary in view of the singers’ immaculate diction. Apparently power failures at the Royal Opera House on the first night resulted in an improvised (and very successful) performance in the bar and I would question the need for staging as such for Into the Little Hill.
Looking through the excellent programme lined up for the Howard – a short Russian season to accompany Paradise Moscow looks especially exciting – I am relieved to note that the only two operas scheduled are extremely small-scale, so hopefully this will prove a one-off problem.
-Ron Simpson
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