For a man who has his first opera raising the curtain on the Aldeburgh Festival this month, the Austrian composer Thomas Larcher has a curiously ambivalent relationship with the human voice. “I used to hate operatic voices. I remember listening to a singer in a record shop in Vienna – in the days when there were record shops – and asking the assistant ‘Is this Florence Foster Jenkins?’ The vibrato was so wide-ranging you couldn’t figure out what was being sung. I later discovered a lot of other possibilities in working with the voice through listening to folk music and artists such as Billie Holliday, Ray Charles and Stevie Wonder.”
And also to Mark Padmore. It was the British tenor, like Larcher an artist-in-residence at Aldeburgh this year, who really impressed on the composer the supremacy of the text when writing for the voice. “Mark was my catalyst; he showed me that the synthesis of text and music is more than the two elements alone,” says Larcher.
His opera The Hunting Gun is drawn from the novella of the same name by Yasushi Inoue. Before setting to work on the piece, he and librettist Friederike Gösweiner pored over the book, discussing each section exhaustively so they knew it intimately before refining it – in German – into the lines to be sung. “It’s quite a complex story and I wanted to do my best to represent the text in music as faithfully as I could.”
For that reason he resisted a request to provide a version in English for Aldeburgh. “There was no way I could. The vocal lines are so deeply connected to the German that it simply wouldn’t work in another language,” he says.
The book features five characters, each with their own personal agony to relate. “When I read the story of The Hunting Gun for the first time, I was immediately captured by its timelessness,” says Larcher. “It addresses questions encountered and recognised by absolutely everyone involved in relationships with other individuals, myself included, such as whether to stay or leave, speak out or stay silent, hold on or let go.”
Larcher gives each character highly individual vocal lines, often acrobatic and often, for the sopranos, extremely high and technically challenging. But it is his orchestration that really captures the imagination. He combines a string quartet with accordion, double bass, prepared piano and all manner of percussion – some played by a chorus of seven who sing as part of the orchestral texture, down in the pit, not on stage. A vast array of instruments are brought into play, including sandblocks, slide whistles, spring coils, thundersheets and wind machine, plus a host of bells, timpani, marimba, woodblocks, a mixing bowl and a small biscuit tin.