While there’s no reason that a children’s opera should be simple or easy, there’s no real need for it to be difficult either. So I was a little confused going into the Barbican’s performance of Oliver Knussen’s brilliant brace of Maurice Sendak adaptations this Saturday, which was surrounded, despite the works’ subject matter, with a slightly unbecoming aura of seriousness. With a programme note which asked us to imagine a world without Oliver Knussen, and a pre-performance talk which included a joke about Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov, I did wonder if due attention had really been paid to appealing to the 4–6s. Thankfully, however, a spectacular account of these two short operas from both director Netia Jones and the musicians ensured that these remarkable pieces spoke for themselves.
This hugely impressive new production combined acting from the singers with projected animations closely based on Sendak’s originals, controlled live in performance by Netia Jones herself. The effect was enchanting, with a dynamic feel to the action, and there were plenty of beautiful moments of interaction between the two operas’ leads and the sketches which surrounded them, from a live Max in Where the Wild Things Are kicking a virtual soft toy around, to a live Jennie the dog in Higglety Pigglety Pop! trying to feed a massive virtual baby.
The more famous Where the Wild Things Are (1979–83) began the show. It’s the story of Max, an angry young boy in a wolf costume, who is sent to bed without supper and goes on a distant voyage to the land of the Wild Things. Max is quickly crowned their king, they have a Wild Rumpus, and then he decides to return home, where some soup, still hot, is waiting for him. The original book is low on text, so Sendak provided some more for the libretto.
What brings the book alive is the brilliance of the illustrations, and while Netia Jones’ fidelity to Sendak’s originals was a good thing in most ways, the lack of deviation from them occasionally led to rather static tableaux, including a Wild Rumpus which frankly wasn’t very wild: a single image of the Wild Things swinging from trees makes for an exciting illustration, but not a very dynamic framework for a live performance, despite some subtle jiggling about. The storytelling also wasn’t helped by an imperfect acoustic in which the singers’ voices were often lost, and this may have been the cause of what seemed to be a slight hesitancy to Britten Sinfonia’s account of the score, technically superb though it was, and perfectly directed by Ryan Wigglesworth.
Only minor complaints, though, because the performance was carried by the elegance of the story, by the brilliance of Claire Booth as Max, and most of all by Knussen’s spellbinding music. It may not be uniquely “for the kiddies”, as my fellow Bachtrack reviewer Ted pointed out of an LA performance last month, but there’s nothing impenetrable about the score, complex though it is; perhaps it is even mysterious and alluring in the same way as Sendak’s illustrations.