George Benjamin, Written on Skin, an Opera

The Middle Ages was a psychic maelstrom. Yes, it was an age of faith. In Europe Christianity was central to most people's way of life. There was also a revival of learning, of course. But to anyone who has experienced Bosch, the Bruegels and some of the imagery contained in Illuminated Manuscripts, you know it was an age of dark thoughts. Hell and the Last Days seemed close, much closer than it does to us in our secular age. Both the Old and New Testaments have some very dark passages, and it seems the Middle Ages knew them much more intimately, much more literally than we do today. In everyday life there was widespread, endemic everyday violence. The persecution and torture of those outside the orthodox political and religious mainstream was all-too-common.

The darkness of the Middle-Ages soul comes through hauntingly, domestically, in George Benjamin's singularly strange and dramatic opera Written on Skin (Nimbus 5885-6 2-CDs). This is the recording of the first performance, at Festival d'Aix-en-Provence, July 2012. The cast of singers, Barbara Hannigan, Bejun Mehta, Christopher Purves, Rebecca Jo Loeb and Allan Clayton is quite excellent, as is the Mahler Chamber Orchestra conducted by the composer.

The text/libretto is central to the singularity of this opera. It was written with a poetic bareness and vivid matter-of-factness by Martin Crimp. I would first off venture to say that I have not experienced such a moving combination of libretto-story and musical expression since Wozzeck and The Devils of Loudun.

A central protagonist is the figure of the "Protector" who rules over his wife Agnes and apparently his feudal subjects with tyranny, yet he professes also a religious purity. The story begins when he commissions a "Boy" artist to create an illuminated manuscript, literally "Written on Skin." In the course of its creation the inner torments and unbalanced excesses of the Protector and the pointed revenge Agnes takes upon her Protector/Tormentor through the Boy involve a bringing of inner thoughts, dark visions to the outside, a making visible of an infernal series of visions if you will. The skin in the end is much more than the manuscript; the horrible world created in the process is brought to the outside, to the "skin" of the protagonists as well.

The story has the hallucinatory darkness of a Medieval vision of hell on earth. Text and music conspire together to create an unforgettably vivid drama. I'd venture to say it is along with the previously reviewed new opera Architect (see July 24, 2013 posting) a landmark work of our current era. As a bonus the 15-minute Benjamin work for piano and orchestra, "Duet," rounds out the second disk in fine fashion.

Written on Skin illuminates a world paradoxically without much in the way of light. In the end no-one wins, yet in the process a brilliant work of art is created. It is a story of contrast, of despair, yet of singular beauty. Do NOT miss it if you are in the modern camp and/or wish to experience contemporary musical drama at its very best!

Kyong Mee Choi, The Eternal Tao, DVD

We are in a mystical zone one more time today. A Taoist opera may not be the stuff of extraordinary action and drama, partially because Taoism has a "do nothing with a purpose" intent at times. Here in the 21st Century, after 100 years of modernism, we don't tend to find that off-putting, at least those who have been exposed to the arts of today in any measure of constancy.

Kyong Mee Choi has created such a work, The Eternal Tao, which combines voices and instruments with electronics, video, dance and enhanced lighting. A DVD of the opera has just become available (Ravello 7866) making it possible to see and hear the complete multimedia presentation.

The music has flow, microscopic detail and at times long clusters of sound that have some relation to works of Ligeti, Xenakis, and Penderecki. The music is not quite as abrasively avant and dissonant as some of the works by those mentioned above, but instead concentrates on oft-times mysteriously floating clouds of sound, other times slightly more pointed sound events that overlap.

The music seems well enough performed and the content of the libretto has to do with Lao Tze's masterwork, the Tao Te Ching. Slow movements of dancers, moody lighting, video juxtapositions of sometimes simple images--a piece of fruit for example--layer over the stage images of dance, the presence and performance of multiple and solo singers, the performance of the orchestra in the foreground. Multiple camera angles overlap at times creating a less literal video image than sheer documentary videos might strive for.

My main quibble with the video is that it is sometimes because of those various image collages difficult to get a feel for what the person in the audience (this is live) might actually be seeing. It is also for the same reason hard to gauge the immediate effect of the dancers on the audience, what the body of dancers look like from the spectator's panoramic glance. So in that sense I find it a little difficult to evaluate the full impact of the dances. They seem to be somewhat integrated, slow gestural movements that fit in with the multifaceted impossibility of describing or representing the Tao.

I will say this: the music/libretto portion of the opera works well. I suppose an actual seat in the performance arena would give me a better idea of the full effect. There are some things a TV screen can't quite represent. Perhaps that is the point?

Anyway, musically/contentually this is of genuine interest! I look forward to hearing more of Kyong Mee Choi and experiencing this opera again.