Page 497 - Media Coverage Book - 75th Aldeburgh Festival 2024

Written in 1993 but condensed in 2006 into this hour-long “pocket version”, it’s a psychological

thriller in which a man discovers (or maybe knows all along) that he is married to his half-sister.

He subsequently kills his best friend, who seems to know about the incest.

Or has he actually killed him? The apparently murdered friend pops up in different guises until

the man himself goes mad and dies. To complicate matters further there’s a supernatural singing

bird watching events unfold and adding her own commentary.

In a way you don’t want a stage director to be too explicit about interpreting the work’s

mysteries and ambiguities, and Robin Norton-Hale certainly doesn’t simplify things. Paying

homage to the story’s German romantic origins, she and her designer Eleanor Bull set the action

in a murky forest. In the centre of it, however, the incestuous couple have sealed themselves in a
modern glass-walled apartment with shutters that descend to hide the outside world from their

sight.

The symbolism is presumably that the forest represents their own psyches and they are trying to

insulate themselves from the dark secrets of their past. But from the first notes of Weir’s sparse

but eerie score we can tell that those secrets will shatter this façade of sedated domesticity

anyway. Time and again the instruments shadow the contours of the vocal lines for a while, only

to break away into tangles of unruly counterpoint — like thoughts that cannot be controlled, or
shocking truths blurted out.

The subtly nuanced acting and expressive singing of a fine cast (Simon Wallfisch, Flora
McIntosh, William Morgan, Aoife Miskelly) adds to that sense of unease. You get a vivid

feeling of traumas barely suppressed. And the ten instrumentalists, all with highly exposed solo

lines, add greatly to the atmosphere under Gerry Cornelius’s precise direction.

★★★★☆

60min
Touring Oct 5-Nov 16, englishtouringopera.org.uk