A trio of monodramas dealing with love, loss and absence in three gender varieties, different settings and the same number of expressive states. Sixty years of music, from Poulenc in 1958 via the late Kaija Saariaho to a new Jack Symonds... and two hours of extraordinary pianism from the latter.
Sydney Chamber Opera's Earth – Voice – Body opened with Artistic Director Symonds’ own work The Shape of the Earth inspired by Patrick White’s novel, Voss. The composer and librettist Pierce Wilcox have reduced that to its idealist anti-hero – based on the lost explorer Ludwig Leichhardt – alone in the desert, dying. A fully ‘male on male’ vision, although distant memories of “his perfumed lover” intrude. Poulenc’s La Voix humaine features only a woman and a telephone, in extremis, talking to her ex who’s going to marry another the next day, and may only be on the phone in order to recover their love letters – virtually ‘the male gaze’ despite his absence. Saariaho’s Quatre Instants is ‘woman on woman’ as her heroine recalls a failed relationship – its longing, its consummation, its pain – from the safer distance of time. And he may be “beyond the sea”. Despite this she keeps declaring “remorse devours me”. Her emotions are surprisingly contained.
All three have their mysteries, to be elucidated by a detective audience. None more so than the Symonds, which received an astounding staging and performance from tenor Mitchell Riley and director Alexander Berlage. On a circular mirror, Riley takes us from the whimsy of his discovery that “men are clotted dirt” to his literally naked reflection that, in the end, "only the soul remains" in the blinding sunlight, which he then escapes by tearing his eyes out. Thunderous piano-playing is enhanced by electronics that conjure the earth torn asunder; then single, unrelated notes amplify the pain of this man in love sent into an empty space.
Did the power of this work tend to overwhelm what followed? I felt that both works were over-dramatised by director Clemence Williams, giving Poulenc’s woman a giant telephone to battle with and Saariaho’s heroine vaguely nautical apparatus to shift and toy with. It suggested a fear that music and texts – both beautifully performed by Celeste Lazarenko and Emily Edmonds respectively – were insufficient to carry the day.
Having snatched a glimpse of Poulenc himself on YouTube accompanying Denise Duval (wearing no less than four rows of pearls) in a straight recital, and heard some of the composer’s extreme colours which inspired Symonds’ own intensity on the keyboard, I would have preferred a straighter Lazarenko. Elle's misery while she lies to her errant lover, recalling moments of joy that he’d already dismissed, needs no big red phone to illuminate.
The Saariaho was also the original piano version, causing me to wonder whether an orchestrated performance would have brought out the four states of her heroine more effectively than an, at times, twiddling piano. It seemed unrelated to her Instant of pain. Emily Edmonds’ mezzo certainly had a velvety tremolo which was a match for her character’s complex sensuality, had her director chosen to let it stand undistracted by having her lay on a revolving beam, paying out metres of rope... for that suggested a connection that was already severed.
