Anvil pride at staging the latest opera by Benjamin (From Basingstoke Gazette)

Anvil pride at staging the latest opera by Benjamin

9:20am Saturday 14th March 2009

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Into The Little Hill and Down By The Greenwood Tree

The Anvil

IT SAYS something for the stature of The Anvil in the world of contemporary classical music that Into the Little Hill – the new opera by George Benjamin (one of Britain’s finest composers) – should be performed there just a week after its London premier.

Benjamin himself conducted The London Sinfonietta and The Opera Group in a co-production with the Royal Opera House.

Singers Claire Booth and Susan Bickley sang the parts of the narrators as well as the roles of The Minister and The Stranger.

Martin Crimp’s text is a contemporary re-telling of the Pied Piper story and is as much about political trickery and the rejection of strangers as child-abduction.

Of course, the story is also a reflection on the power of music, and includes the telling line “with music I can open a heart as easily as I can open a door”.

The 15 instrumentalists fielded an exotic range of instruments, including a bass flute, contrabass clarinet, contrabassoon, euphonium, mandolin and banjo, producing some wonderfully evocative sounds.

The evening opened with another 40-minute opera, Harrison Birtwistle’s 1969 Down by the Greenwood Tree, with a libretto written by Michael Nyman before he also became a famous composer.

This combination of opera and theatre contrasted a bawdy and rather gruesome mummers’ play – including such characters as a very tipsy Father Christmas, St George, the Bold Slasher and Dr Blood – with operatic interpretations of two English folk ballads involving mothers who kill their children, sung by the excellent soprano, Claire Booth.

Although the audience was not huge, it was certainly appreciative – and, as some might have spotted, musically distinguished.

-Andrew Benson-Wilson

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