L'Oresteïa
Iannis Xenakis

 

Londres
15, 18, 19 et 21 janvier 2000
Royal Opera House, Covent Garden

Presse et Photos

  


Xenakis has a reputation for writing music of excruciating dissonance at ear-busting volume, and this particular work (receiving its British premiere) comprises a solid hour of chanting in Ancient Greek, without anything so bourgeois as a surtitle on hand to aid comprehension. Not a prospect to lure the culturally timid away from Blind Date.

But the timid missed a remarkable evening, and I urge those of a braver disposition to snap up all tickets for the remaining shows (tonight, tomorrow and Friday). No, you don't understand a word that is sung - but so graphic is the staging, so intense the performances, so savage Xenakis's music, that Aeschylus's drama crashes like a thunderclap across 2.500 years.

     
 
Xenakis cuts the story to its big bones : Agamemnon's murder, the revenge killing of Klytemnestra and Aegisthus, the cursing of Orestes, and then (in a wonderfully exuberant finale) the intervention of Athena, goddess of reason, to end the power of primitive gods and give man control over his own destiny. In Alain Germain's staging these events are presented as stark, violent rituals, emerging out of swirling dry-ice like ancient legends from the mists of time.
     
Much of Aeschylus's text is swept up into epic declamations, superbly delivered in an extraordinary mixture of falsetto and baritone by Anthony Scales and Kevin Beckett.
     


Meanwhile, Xenakis's score, brilliantly played by Spectrum under Guy Protheroe, screeches, rattles and roars, with screaming piccolo and tumultuous percussion to the fore. It's not easy to listening, but it is gripping.
At the end the youngsters of the New London Children's Choir run into the audience, handing out crackly Cellophane for us to wave in celebration. Yes, a very Sixties moment, but it worked : you really felt, as Aeschylus intended, that the darkness of primordial superstition had been banished by the clear shining light of Athenian reason.
     
Richard Morrison. Times

 

 

 

Greek bearing gifts

Iannis Xenakis's strictly mathematical music can suggest volcanoes exploding, earthquakes and landslides. But in supplying a spectrum of percussion effects and simple vocal lines for parts of Aeschylus's Oresteia he is simply assisting a distant classical tradition now inaccessible to us. At the Linbury Studio Theatre the English Bach Festival performance creates, with limited means, a strong impression of an alien theatrical form, full of energy and mimetic power.

     
It isn't really opera. Yet Xenakis's Oresteia follows the route of the Florentine experimenters of Monteverdi's time, who invented opera while trying to revive authentic ancient Greek drama. Xenakis is probably even closer to home, using the tradition of orthodox chant alternating with speech.
The simplicity of Alain Germain's staging is impressive. A few shafts of light pierce the blackness behind a phalanx of baroque-looking classical columns and pilasters. There's smoke in the air. A mostly English company as the chorus wear simple maroon togas and, later, plain white tunic-dresses.
     
The most memorable elements are the Kassandra of Anthony Scales, in a dowager-like black wig, mastering great challenging leaps from falsetto to deep bass, and Kevin Beckett's goddess Athena in an equally duchessy blond hairpiece, holding forth in ancient Greek and high falsetto.
     

Christopher Brannick's percussion virtuosity is fantastic, while most of the small orchestra of brass and woodwind (with one cello) double up at times in hitting percussion instruments. Guy Protheroe conducts.

With just a few touches, the familiar story of Orestes is conveyed, avenging his father's murder and pursued to distraction by Furies. We hear the Greek text they've learnt to utter, though surtitles would help.
The sense of mimed celebration and hieratic ritual is completely absorbing and fresh - tinged with a suppressed frantic hysteria.

     
Tom Sutcliffe. Evening Standard