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.
First came the Mozart, the mass for the dead left unfinished at the composer’s own death in 1791, completed by his amanuensis and pupil, Franz Xaver Süssmayr. The staging, at the start, mirrored the music’s opening mystery: bassoon and basset horn in lone conversation rising over soft, throbbing strings; dancers shimmying along the floor, as if struggling for safety, while singers emerged from upstage darkness. A mood of sorrow was immediately established.
In Joanna Parker’s designs, black shards hanging from the rafters confirmed a funereal setting: like burnt sackcloth or incinerated wood. Mostly the chorus stood still and rock-like, regrouping as needed, while the dancers were fluid and expressive. The vocal soloists – Ellie Laugharne, Ann Taylor, Mongezi Mosoaka and Simon Shibambu – slipped between the two ensembles without any narrative attempted or needed. With perfect drill not the chief aim, the dancers had the chance to let their individuality shine. At times the whole company came together, as if in an association of tears.
After Tears shows the other side of grief: a return to life even in the midst of mourning. According to Muyanga’s programme note, this is a new tradition in South Africa, particularly observed by young people after funerals in the townships. After ceremonial actions with staff and bowl, and a recitation in Sesotho, ritual gave way to pulsating dance music, with sweeping, melodic strings and a battery of percussion that had chorus and dancers jigging. As music for those left behind, it had a joyful, unstoppable sense of renewal. We should all adopt this habit.
With one event scuppered by trains and a replacement cancelled on the day, I opted instead for an unusual bank programme concert by the Jerusalem Quartet at Wigmore Hall, the first of a pair of concerts last week at Wigmore Hall. The title was Yiddish Cabaret, part of a project initiated by the quartet to explore Jewish music in Poland between the two world wars, and its wider influence. Five Pieces for String Quartet by the Austro-Czech composer Erwin Schulhoff (1894-1942), condemned as degenerate by the Nazis, opened the concert. Short dance movements, following the idea of a baroque suite, are doused in punchy jazz rhythms, irony and dissonance, with plenty of star moments for viola player Ori Kam.
Hila Baggio, Israeli operatic soprano and all-round versatile stage animal, performed five songs, in Yiddish, for voice and string quartet by Leonid Desyatnikov (b.1955). He based these transcriptions on popular, sentimental songs from urban Poland before the Holocaust. The subjects of despair, poverty and laughter were familiar and almost interchangeable in Erich Korngold’s String Quartet No 2 (1934), written just before the Viennese composer left Europe to work with the Warner brothers in the US, which completed the concert. The music has grace in abundance, but leaves you hungry for grit and depth. The Jerusalem Quartet, a virtuosic ensemble with a glorious, meaty sound and irresistible panache, showed their mettle – tantalisingly – in an encore: the Allegretto Pizzicato from Bartók’s fourth quartet. If only they could have played the whole thing. They’ll be back.
Star ratings (out of five)
Requiem ★★★★★
Jerusalem Quartet ★★★
