Lost in an endless labyrinth of an opera
Harrison Birtwistle's The Minotaur may leave you stranded, says Michael White
25 April 2008

The gods, heroes and horrors of ancient Greece have been regular visitors to the work of this country's most eminent composer Harrison Birtwistle over the past four decades, and their presence has been at least partly responsible for the earthy, primal, epic brutality that some listeners consider his calling card.

That the brutality contains a kind of beauty, like a northern industrial counterpart to southern English Pastoral (and there's an argument to be made for Birtwistle as a true heir to Vaughan Williams), tends to be forgotten in the wake of pieces like the infamous Panic (whose title wasn't just a fair guess at the audience's response but yet another inspiration from the Greek, Pani-ic pertaining to the god Pan). But for those with ears to hear, the brutal/beauty paradox is there. And never more magnificently than in his latest myth-based score The Minotaur: a Hammer House of Horror opera, dripping blood and gore, which premiered at Covent Garden last week.

It was a project undertaken in trusted company with the librettist David Harsent (also librettist of Birtwistle's last big opera Gawain), director Stephen Langridge and designer Alison Chitty (both of whom have worked with Birtwistle before), and above all John Tomlinson, the celebrated British bass who stole the show in Gawain and for whom the title role in this new work was conceived. In fact, so much was The Minotaur written for Tomlinson it even referenced his career with what I assume to be conscious evocations of Boris Godunov, Billy Budd, and the Ring Cycle: the repertory that made his name.

Last week was nothing less than the expected tour de force as Tomlinson, mustering all the dignity you can in a bull's head and chest-wig, loped monstrously around the stage devouring virgins and roaring with the full force of one of the biggest Wagner voices going.

But more interestingly, Birtwistle's idea of the minotaur runs deeper than this, to a creature whose bestial and human halves are in conflict and given voice according to the level of his consciousness.

Awake, he's an incoherent animal, attending to routine slaughter with perfunctory indifference. But asleep he finds a tongue, a self-awareness, and a sense of his entrapment in this labyrinth of violence that transforms him into what all music-theatre needs: a central character who keeps the audience on-side. And, superlative artist that he is, Tomlinson handled that transformation with a subtlety that matched its strength.

Oddly for a title role, he didn't have so much to sing as the female lead Ariadne; but when he did sing, he held the stage. And with his perfectly projected diction every word came through - helped by the fact that Minotaur's score is more voice-centred than Birtwistle operas tend to be, with more transparent textures that clear space for the singing and rations the usual, grinding massivity.

All the roles, in fact, came through with clarity in a staging where clean, simple statement was the order of the day - allowing for a smear of gore and entrail here and there. Christine Rice's Ariadne, Johan Reuter's Theseus, and counter-tenor Andrew Watts sporting the world's largest ethnic bosom as a Snake Priestess, turned in fine performances under conductor Antonio Pappano, who showed a sure grasp of a difficult score. Between them, they told the story well.

But as Birtwistle likes to say, for him opera isn't about the story: it's about a compositional idea, a shape, a structure, that engages him and suggests a story. And with Minotaur it's been the labyrinth: an idea that has actually informed his work for years, expressed in music that encircles and returns as though padding around some central object and appraising it from 360 degrees.

A kind of musical cubism, this oblique, processional circularity is one of those things you either like or hate about the composer, and it accounts for his sometimes over long durations. But relatively speaking Minotaur is concise and, if anything, ends too soon - closing, fairly enough, on the monster's corpse after a lyrical last gasp of self-knowledge, but with a sense of unfinished business in both the narrative and music.

It's as though the endless turning of this labyrinthine work hasn't quite delivered you to the centre of the maze but abandons you all the same, and without the crucial bit of string to get back. It's a problem. But then again, a composer who leaves you wanting more is better than one who leaves you wanting less.