Unusually graphic and violent, Harrison Birtwistle's 'The Minotaur' captures the flavor and feeling of ancient Greek myth with an extremely compelling production.
You radio fans probably recognize Paul Harvey's signature phrase, wherein after a brief tease usually built around fairly well recognized facts, he would delve into the background of things as varied as a celebrity's childhood to the development of a famous product. I thought of Harvey as I watched this fascinating production of English composer Harrison Birtwistle's The Minotaur, as it gives an unusual perspective on a myth that is typically told from the human love interest side of things, as in Richard Strauss' Ariadne auf Naxos. Here the human and bestial interact, with sometimes surprising results. A story that has often boiled down to a sort of hero's quest, with a tangential romantic angle, here becomes something decidedly more tragic, akin to three characters in search of an escape. Birtwistle and librettist David Harsent neatly turn this myth on its bullish head, giving us not just the "rest of the story" of Ariadne, Theseus and the Minotaur, but the events leading up to the main storyline of Strauss' famous work. (It's interesting to note that there are actually several historical operas at least tangentially related to this story or its characters, including what might be thought of as a pre-prequel, Jean-Baptiste Lully's Thésée.)
Theseus has adopted a "no bull" policy.
Greek myth seems perfectly suited to the grandiose aims of opera, something the idiom's earliest proponents understood and used to their advantage. Somewhere along the line, both original conceptions and adaptations of more popular stories and works of literature took over the art form, so that by the time the late 19th and early 20th centuries rolled around, mythically based pieces like those of Wagner or Strauss were the exception rather than the rule. British composer Birtwistle seems poised to reclaim that tradition, having already offered Gawain (with Harsent on board as librettist there as well) and, now, The Minotaur. Under this spare and lean production at Covent Garden (where the opera premiered in 2008) one can almost imagine they're at an ancient ampitheater, watching classical actors, some complete with masks, enact a timeless story. The Minotaur not only portrays myth, by the nature of its staging it seems to embody it in a mesmerizing and compelling manner.
Though Birtwistle's name may not be that familiar to audiences on this side of the pond, the now 70-something composer has a long and distinguished career behind him. Once numbered among the sort of "angry young men" of mid- to late-50's English music, sort of akin to writers like English theater's John Osborne, Birtwistle was placed, rightly or wrongly, as part of "The Manchester School," which also included such perhaps better known names as Peter Maxwell Davies. Birtwistle tends to work in an often strident, near dodecaphonic idiom that is full of sharp angles and clanging percussion, something that he exploits to an incredible degree in The Minotaur. The influence of Edgard Varèse is completely apparent in this score, with huge, massed blocks of sound playing out against various percussive effects that at times are quite reminiscent of such gargantuan Varèse efforts as Amériques. This tendency can make Birtwistle's vocal lines less than lyrical a lot of the time, but that works for a piece like The Minotaur, which finds three tormented characters in the throes of emotional meltdowns.
This is an unusually graphic and violent piece which may set some viewers' teeth on edge. Birtwistle and Harsent have provided director Stephen Langridge with a story that refuses to flinch from the rape, pillaging, death and destruction which so frequently inhabit the world of Greek myth. (It's interesting to note that the Minotaur's conception itself may have been the result of a forced inter-species union). Perhaps strangely, all of this violence plays out rather spectacularly as a sort of dissociative pageant, a virtually ritualistic reenactment that may at least partially provide respite to the audience while also delivering a gut punch that isn't easily forgotten.
The Minotaur's scenic design features a rather minimalistic set which is augmented by some appealing projections of water, highlighting the feeling that this trio is cast asunder on a frightening madhouse of an island, a sort of operatic analogue to television's own very mythic Lost. In Birtwistle and Harsent's conception, the Minotaur (John Tomlinson) is an inarticulate mass of emotion, able to access his human language skills only in dreams. By contrast, both Theseus (Johan Reuter) and Ariadne (Christine Rice) are hyperarticulate and either in spite of that proclivity or because of it, seem somewhow slightly removed from their feeling sides, almost as if they're spectators of their own predicament, rather than participants. It sets up a rather neat dialectic and brings some unexpected psychological import to Theseus' quest to kill the Minotaur.
Divided into 13 scenes of three varying types, The Minotaur plays out as an epic despite its somewhat small scale, cast-wise. We have the larger, ensemble scenes, where a gallery views the Minotaur decimating his sacrificial victims. Moving up the scale of intimacy, we then are presented with several duet scenes between Ariadne and Theseus, as they wend their way through their personal labyrinths attempting to find a glimmer of redemptive hope. Finally, there are the Minotaur's dream sequences, wherein he both figuratively and literally finds his voice and is able to finally declaim his personal turmoil. Birtwistle does an exceptional job of crafting a varied compositional approach to handle each of these elements, though the overall score is completely cohesive, helped along by the omnipresent percussion.
Two of my favorite recent "modern" operas (for wont of a better term, and speaking only exclusively of when they were written, not their subject matter) are from British composers. Last year we got Jonathan Dove's delightful Pinocchio and now we have this elegant and disturbing world premiere of Birtwistle's The Minotaur. Too often the British are seen as also-rans in the world of opera, despite a long and impressive history, stretching back at least to Purcell and including such masters as Britten and Tippett. Luckily Birtwistle, despite his advancing years, shows no sign of slowing down. The Minotaur is an incredibly expressive piece that may shock some of those who prefer their operas relatively polite and pristine. But Birtwistle and Harsent rightly realize that's not the stuff of myth.
Aside from the relatively rare interpolations of the sea projections, other backdrops and some of the masks the gallery wears, The Minotaur's AVC encoded 1.78:1 1080i image plays out in tones of whites, grays, blacks and browns, a palette that aptly mirrors its three main characters. Detail here is quite exceptional, made more impressive when one takes into account the minimal amount of scenery and the spare costuming. Fleshtones are all accurate, and the Minotaur's fanciful costume is shown in all its hairy glory. In fact the detail of this Blu-ray may lead to some squeamishness on the part of some viewers, as the death scenes are rather gruesome and quite bloody, with robust color, to say the least. Contrast is superb and black levels are strong and consistent, playing off this opera's tendency toward a dark stage.
This is one of the more robust DTS HD-MA offerings that Opus Arte has given us in their almost always excellent catalogue of Blu-ray releases. With an unusually expressive low end, which makes the most of the subwoofer in some of the percussive moments, this is a score that shakes, rattles and rolls, and the DTS soundtrack comes through with an almost startling clarity and visceral punch. Birtwistle's declamatory winds and strings leap to and fro in this score, and they are reproduced here with a certain astringency that completely mirrors the emotional upheaval the main characters are experiencing. Fidelity is always topnotch, and the balance between the singers and orchestra is also exceptional. Because of Birtwistle's tendency toward large (sometimes huge) intervallic leaps in his vocal lines, some of the verbiage of Harsent's libretto gets lost in the melodic muddle, so the optional English subitles come in quite handy. Because of the good use of surround channels, especially with regard to the percussion, I don't recommend utilizing the adequate PCM 2.0 track.
A 32:30 featurette enttitled Myth is Universal offers some really excellent background information on not just the production but the Minotaur story itself. The disc also features the usual illustrated synopsis and cast gallery. Again, per the norm, the insert booklet features an essay.
One of the more unusual and visceral offerings to come down the operatic pike in quite some time, Harrison Birtwistle's The Minotaur evokes the ethos of classical Greek theater while mining a compositional world that is completely modern and remarkably forceful. This may not be easy to sit through, and is in fact quite graphically violent at times, but it's an important work and one of the best new operas of the past several decades.
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