What does an audience want? No one can answer that fugitive question with certainty. All the bells and whistles of data research may help, but the only reliable tool is trust built up over decades. Opera North has learned this. Few would have predicted that bonding Italian baroque music to Indian classical, as the company did last year with Orpheus, would prove a perfect fit. Now they have paired Mozart’s Requiem with an uplifting, rhythmic world premiere, After Tears, by the Soweto-born composer Neo Muyanga (b.1974), setting two dance companies loose to express the music’s contrasting moods in twirls, lifts and stomps of every kind. “Smashed it mate,” noted a tweeter straight after opening night. They had.
The link between the two works was grief. (The UK opera season so far, the fruits of lockdown, has not stinted on melancholy.) Calling the double bill Requiem: Journeys of the Soul, Opera North united the company’s chorus and orchestra with the Leeds-based contemporary dance company Phoenix Dance Theatre and Cape Town’s Jazzart Dance Theatre, in harness with Cape Town Opera. There’s no way to shorten that list. All deserve credit. As part of Leeds 2023’s year of culture – “the world in our city, the city in our world” – this was an exemplary collaboration, choreographed and directed by Dane Hurst. The show was not as risky as Orpheus, in which the music itself was fused – here it remained discrete, perceptively conducted by Garry Walker – but the sense of adventure was equally strong.
