Donnacha Dennehy - The Hunger
The Abbey Theatre, 2019
Alan Pierson, The Crash Ensemble, Tom Creed, Katherine Manley, Iarla Ó Lionáird
The Abbey Theatre, Dublin - 23 August 2019
The subject of the Great Irish Famine of 1845-52 is a very big subject for any Irish artist, one that touches deep on the most fundamental emotional, social and political levels. For an Irish composer whose roots lie within the idiom of Irish traditional music there's something here then that must be delved into. Irish traditional music is the language of the common people and has its roots in the culture and the community, speaking of suffering, adversity and oppression. It's essentially this that Donnacha Dennehy approaches head-on in The Hunger.
Whether it's opera or a song cycle or something else, like all of Dennehy's forays into the lyric theatre (The Last Hotel, The Second Violinist), The Hunger doesn't fit into any easy categorisation. The work draws on writings by an American 19th century reformer Asenath Nicholson, who witnessed some of the worst privations in Ireland during the height of the potato famine. Dennehy weaves these observations and impressions into songs that feature his familiar Steve Reich-like repetitive percussive rhythms built this time even more evidently around Irish traditional melodies and laments. Video clips of interviews with academics on the subject of the Irish Famine are used to present the subject in the wider context of economic market theory and contemporary society.
What isn't there to speak of in The Hunger, or at least not in any traditional operatic sense, is dramatic action. The main figure is Asenath Nicholson, the narrator, who is witness to a number of horrific scenes. She sees a man digging in the ground, not for potatoes but to bury his daughter. He sings a piece based on a keening lament and an old-style (sean-nós) song, 'Na Prátaí Dubha' (The Black Potatoes). Her sense of helplessness, uncertainty about how to help in the face of such abject poverty and suffering is in contrast to the video interview commentary that describes how the English accepted this as a necessary consequence of a market economy and how they felt or admitted to little in the way of guilt for importing product from Ireland at the same time that people were dying of starvation there.
It doesn't take much imagination to see the relevance of The Hunger to what we see today in a world where similar attitudes exist, where inequalities are greater still, where people are dying in the sea to escape poverty and starvation while others fly around in luxury jets and book holidays in space; where people are using food banks while politicians and bankers work the market in their own personal favour. It's undoubtedly why the piece is called The Hunger, not The Famine. It's about expressing the underlying reality of one of the most inhumane forms of inaction in letting people die of hunger, and worse, in some cases there's a conscious acceptance that it's a necessary consequence of living in the modern world. It's probably for the same reason that Steve McQueen's film about the 1981 Hunger Strikes is also called Hunger, a film about Ireland again and what some would see as a similar confrontation with English indifference, the idea of someone dying of hunger recognised as an act of ultimate desperation the world over.
Evidently then the subject of The Hunger is potentially miserable and there's no point pretending that there's anything uplifting here, but there is something stoical in the perspective of the man whose laments are observed in contrast to the observations of a witness and academics. Conducted by Alan Pierson, the Crash Ensemble's playing holds a consistent musical narrative structure with an occasional dissonance that expresses a cruelty within the social structure that gives rise to such conditions. It's in the sean-nós and keening lament that gives this a human voice, an authentic voice that comes from within, that touches on the roots of the Irish condition and can't be expressed any other way. Its weaving in and out and repetition has much the same impact as Gavin Bryers' Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet.
The use of amplification was evident, but the singing performances by Katherine Manley and Iarla Ó Lionáird come from those emotional depths. For its stage performance at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, director Tom Creed strives to find a variety of means to add other levels and dimensions as an alternative to traditional dramatic action. It's not so much the accumulation of individual elements for visual interest - the video clips, the landscapes, the plot of rocky land, the mountains and cloudscapes - it's how they come together to paint a bigger picture that extends out beyond the confines of the Irish Famine to make a point about the deeper human drives that cause hunger and that hunger causes.
Dennehy's music works very much in the same way, adding layers, blending and mixing instruments and songs, striking notes and sounds that reflect the complex and painful situations that are described here and the human feelings behind them. For such an ambitious subject Dennehy covers all the bases, from the outside eye-witness account of Nicholson's texts, the modern perspective that puts it into historical context and highlights the contemporary relevance, but it's Dennehy's music that touches on and expresses the most vital viewpoint of what the Famine means to the Irish, something that has not been lost, but has been preserved in Irish traditional music and still has the power to speak to us today.
Links: The Abbey Theatre
Donnacha Dennehy - The Last Hotel
Wide Open Opera, Dublin - 2015
Alan Pierson, André de Ridder, Enda Walsh, Robin Adams, Claudia Boyle, Katherine Manley, Mikel Murfi
Sky Arts, 2016
The concept and playing out of the first opera by Donnacha Dennehy and Enda Walsh is what you might call situational; which is why it's called The Last Hotel, I guess. It involves only three characters who come to a run-down and quite sinister hotel with some rather unsettling if somewhat vague intentions, plus one non-singing character, a demonic hotel porter.
Sinister and demonic are perhaps the key words here, as there's little that you'll find common or inviting as you try to figure out who these people are, what has brought them together and what they are doing at the hotel. There is very much a 'huis clos' kind of feel to a situation that is quite divorced from any kind of realism, and you do indeed even wonder if the Last Hotel is indeed some kind of waiting room for the after-life where these characters have met up in death.
As it happens, no-one has died yet, or at least none of the three principal characters; I can't say anything for sure about the existential state of the demonic porter who is seen rapidly cleaning up the blood from the last guests, but it's clear that death is not far away. As the Woman introduces herself and makes small-talk conversation about the journey over to the hotel with the Man and his Wife, we find out that death is very much on the agenda.
The exchanges and the interior monologues that each of the three of them express are however rather vague and poetically impressionistic. All of them however are rather nervous, a little bit panicky about what is to take place, and all of them are trying to put a brave face on what they are about to participate in. A rehearsal is proposed and it becomes apparent that the Man and his Wife have agreed to come to the hotel to help the Woman end her life. For reasons that are similarly unclear, but edgily urgent...
If there is an edgy urgency to the situation and a sinister and demonic aspect to what is to transpire, it's conveyed primarily by the driving propulsion of Donnacha Dennehy's distinctive music score. Performed by the terrific Crash Ensemble, Dennehy's music has the percussive energetic chug of Michael Nyman, but supplemented with flute, accordion and electric guitar it is underpinned by a structure and rhythm that has all the cadences, repetitive loops and shifts of Irish traditional music.
It's the music that gives the otherwise fairly obscure and poetic reverie of Enda Walsh's libretto its essential character. The three characters do interact, but it's mostly nervous small-talk that skirts around the purpose of their being at the hotel. They do break out or rather slip inward into more reflective consideration of their condition, but there are no specifics that reveal anything about the circumstances that have brought them together at this point. If it comes together at all, it's very much down to the music keeping up a tone and a momentum.
If the words don't carry much in the way of information or insight, there is at least some expression of character and situation in the writing for the voice. It's a surprisingly lyrical piece and not as recitative heavy as you might expect a contemporary English-language opera to be. Again, I think much of this has to do with the Irish music rhythms that align lyrically to the voice, and the urgent continuity of those rhythms and the tensions that are generated inevitably pushes the voices into the higher registers.
Premiered at the Edinburgh festival, Wide Open Opera's The Last Hotel also ran at the 2015 Dublin Theatre Festival (Dennehy's second opera with Enda Walsh The Second Violinist will feature there in the 2017 festival) and it was filmed there at the O'Reilly Theatre for Sky Arts. Originally conducted by André de Ridder, Alan Pierson takes over the direction of the 12-piece Crash Ensemble for the filmed performance.
The film version retains the minimal sets of the stage production for the live performance, but includes filmed cut-aways in and around a hotel when the focus turns on the individuals having their 'moments', giving the opera a little more room to expand outwards without losing any of its intensity. The intensity of the work and the kind of challenges of the singing are taken up well by the cast, with Claudia Boyle the Woman, Robin Adams the Man and Katherine Manley his Wife.
It took a week to get B*Witched's C'est la Vie out of my head.
Links: The Last Hotel, Wide Open Opera
Michel van der Aa - Sunken Garden
Opéra de Lyon, 2015
Etienne Siebens, Michel van der Aa, Roderick Williams, Katherine Manley, Claron McFadden, Jonathan McGovern, Kate Miller-Heidke
TNP, Lyon - 15 March 2015
One of the benefits of seeing a modern and fairly experimental new opera like Michel van der Aa's Sunken Garden as part of the wider context of Opéra de Lyon's 'Les Jardins Mystérieux' opera mini festival is that it helps put it into context, highlighting and contrasting it with other works on a similar broad theme. Here, Sunken Garden is set alongside Franz Schreker's Die Gezeichneten and Gluck's Orfeo ed Euridice, and surprisingly the comparison does tend to work in its favour.
Having only heard Sunken Garden previously on a BBC Radio 3 broadcast during its premiere performances at the English National Opera in 2013, it didn't really seem to work as a conventional opera. Even more so than other operas, this was however clearly a work where the visual component is just as important as the music. Involving a number of other different disciplines and embracing all kinds of new technology, radio obviously wasn't really the right medium to explore a 3-D film-opera. At its French premiere in the Théâtre National Populaire in the Villeurbanne suburb of Lyon, 'Le jardin englouti' clearly worked well on the stage and received a much more enthusiastic response from what looked like a sold-out performance.
Seen fully-performed, some aspects however, such as David Mitchell's compendium of stock phrases and banal cliches that represent 'the way real people speak', still grated, but these were probably not as evident to a French audience. When viewed in performance, the supernatural elements of the story, built-up through the dialogues of a small cast and with filmed interviews sections, comes across even more so as having the whole look and feel of an average episode of Doctor Who. In the context of the Mysterious Gardens festival however, and particularly having watched an ambitious staging of Orfeo ed Euridice at the Lyon Opera House just the previous night, it encouraged one to think a little more about the content and themes of the work.
If you can get past the banalities of a plot where a meglomaniac evil villain seeks a means of achieving immortality by capturing the souls of others and holding them in a 'sunken garden', essentially it's no more ridiculous an idea than a hunchback dwarf creating a paradise for decadent nobles to indulge their corrupt lusts, or for a musician to journey to Hell in the hope of bringing his beloved wife back from the dead. Regardless of the musical means and the technology used to put this across, similar themes are explored in Sunken Garden, and they do have rather more weight and meaning that could easily be missed in dazzle and colour of the spectacle, although ideally it ought to enhance them.
Sunken Garden is about secret places, the kind of secret place that one wishes they could withdraw to when faced with the horrors or even just the difficulties of everyday life when it gets too much to deal with. Like Orpheus, Toby Kramer is an artist who has suffered loss after the death of his wife, and seeks to find answers or some kind of solace in his work. A multi-media artist, Kramer is pouring his energies into a new project based on the real-life disappearance of a young man, Simon Vines, filming interviews with friends, trying to understand what could have motivated someone to choose to leave a successful life and career behind him, if it was even a choice he made himself. A wealthy donor, the owner of an art gallery, is fascinated by Kramer's work so far, and willing to keep providing him with funds to expand it into a 3-D film.
The longer Kramer works on the project, the stranger the disappearance of Simon Vine appears, the artist discovering documents and footage on a mobile phone that suggests that Vine's former girlfriend Amber Jacquemain has also disappeared. Dealing with his own loss, Kramer's personal involvement in the work deepens, much to the frustration of Zenna Briggs, the representative from the art gallery who is getting impatient with the slow progress of the project. Eventually, Kramer discovers that Simon and Amber have both been abducted, their souls being sucked dry to fuel a sunken garden in another dimension to feed the desire of a villain who wants to be immortal; a person he already knows.
As ludicrous as it might sound, Sunken Garden does in its own way - and really not so different from the ambitions of Alviano Salvago and Orpheus - seek to create a paradise that takes one away and makes one immune from the horrors and tyranny of everyday existence. Ultimately Kramer has to decide whether he wants to cut himself off from the world, initially through his never-ending art project, and then in some manufactured world of technology (seeking solace and escape in technology is a major theme here and the entire raison d'être for all the 3-D technology in the film-opera itself). The realisation that there is a downside to any ambitions to create a paradise outside of the boundaries of natural order is one that Kramer, much like his counterparts in Die Gezeichneten and Orfeo ed Euridice, has to eventually accept and come to terms with, but it's not an easy decision to make.
Visually then, the sunken garden must be an alluring but slightly sinister place, and the impressive 3-D film technology used by Michel van der Aa does that very well, justifying its use as much more than a gimmick. The composer is well-known for his efforts to expand the range of lyric drama and musical expression, and as such it's not so much a question of attempting to progress opera into new directions, as much as making best use of all the resources available now that will allow full expression of the ideas of the subject. Assessing the value of Sunken Garden as a purely musical drama is not really relevant either. It's only one small part of a much more widely-encompassing view of opera as music theatre. On its own the music might not be particularly memorable, but it is eclectic, and doesn't feel constrained to fit old models of expression, using sequencers and sound effects as well as more traditional instrumentation, freely borrowing from a wide range of modern influences (Radiohead being an acknowledged inspiration).
Whether this means that the work has any place in posterity doesn't seem to be foremost in the mind of the composer/director/filmmaker either - although its revival here for Lyon is a good sign. Van der Aa's concern seems to be solely with putting the work across in the most effective way with whatever state-of-the-art means are available now, and it's a highly effective and imaginative stage production. If it is revived in the future, a production doesn't necessarily need to use 3-D or the same pre-recorded filmed performances - two of the singers don't appear in person here - but, much like the reinventions of older works for the modern stage (to again go back to the extraordinary Lyon production of Orfeo ed Euridice), it can be freely reinterpreted using whatever new technology is available. Whatever means is used - whether that's holograms or use of other dimensions (hey, who knows?) - the message about the misuse of technology and its incompatibility with human nature will surely still be relevant.
Links: Opéra de Lyon
