What does it take to make an opera? Music, of course, at least one singing voice, some text to be sung. Then you need action, if not necessarily a plot. Beyond that, the possibilities stretch on and on.
Lasting about an hour, Henryk Górecki’s Third Symphony – which carries the subtitle “Symphony of Sorrowful Songs” - has music, a voice and text; of action there is none. Górecki wrote it in 1976. In 1992, London Sinfonietta’s recording, with Dawn Upshaw the soloist, unexpectedly sold a million copies: unheard of for a modern symphony.
Still, it’s not an opera, so it’s surprising that English National Opera is closing its current season by staging it. Górecki wrote the piece for a string-heavy orchestra and the music moves dolefully, hypnotically, through three movements. Each has text depicting a woman’s despair: a 15th-century lamentation, a prayer scratched on the wall of Gestapo HQ during the Second World War, a folk song (all sung in the original Polish; ENO breaking its own cardinal rule). A sombre piece, it has an underlying optimism in the resilience of the human spirit.
Isabella Bywater’s staging doesn’t quite avoid the temptation to overload it with surplus action: she describes it as “almost an installation”. The music opens with a barely audible whisper from the double basses – under conductor Lidiya Yankovskaya, the orchestra plays superbly throughout. We see three still figures: a man on a chair, a prone body suspended in mid-air, a woman apparently mourning its death.
At first it seems that they might go the full Tilda Swinton, remaining motionless throughout, but soon there’s movement: the man slopes off, the woman drags herself across to his chair. Soon she’s joined by several silent figures, companions or antagonists, who crawl, march and writhe their way throughout. The woman is soprano Nicole Chevalier, whose voice strikes the right balance between misery and soaring passion. She is a commanding presence whose stillness renders the zombie-like supernumeraries nearly redundant.
The set consists of two “walls” coming together at a point to the rear of the stage, their surfaces endlessly shifting thanks to inventive lighting and video design, which provide all the action needed. The costumes, meanwhile, are sourced from charity shops, a gesture towards Jerzy Grotowski’s concept of “poor theatre”.
Bywater’s production is bold, often mysterious. If it doesn’t entirely work, that’s no reason not to try it. Before curtain-up, Stuart Murphy, ENO’s imminently-departing chief executive, delivered a speech taking wry digs at those responsible for the mishandled attempt to move ENO to Manchester. Nicholas Serota of Arts Council England and Michael Gove were among those warned that “History is watching you”. I’m not sure they’ll take much notice, but the sentiment was warmly received.
