Page 436 - Aldeburgh Festival 2022 FINAL COVERAGE BOOK

everyone except Violet. The possibility of the apocalypse jolts her out of the numbness of her
marriage. Faced with certain death, she finally decides to start living.

There’s a fable-like quality to Birch’s story. The simply structured scenes reflecting individual days
and the sense of familiarity that falls away to reveal alien menace beneath creates a strong skeleton
for Coult to build his music around. This is a story about gaps – between understanding and
action, people, in time and life – and both plot and score understand the value of negative space, of
not telling, not explaining. The result is gnomic, by turns witty and deeply unsettling.

Coult, whose award-winning career was launched when he signed with Faber aged just 25, studied
with George Benjamin. It’s no reflection on Violet’s own voice that you can trace its lineage back to
the older composer’s Pied Piper-retelling Into the Little Hill and, more recently, the domestic
tragedy Written on Skin – one of the few operas of the past decade to have entered the
international repertoire.

Concision and precision – of colour, gesture, and expression – are shared characteristics. But
Coult tempers restraint with occasional moments of excess from his four singers and a 13-strong
London Sinfonietta. Spare textures suddenly thicken into a web of instrumental strands,
contrabass clarinet dark against glinting harp, a riot of ticking and clicking percussion pulsing
beneath. Then a voice limited to single, bell-chime syllables – “Yes”, “No” – suddenly flowers into
Monteverdi-like melismas; a vocal arpeggio soars up and up.

Jude Christian’s production catches the precision of Violet’s words and music. Simple objects – a
wooden trestle table, a jug of flowers, a bread-knife, a tree suspended upside-down from the
ceiling – create a domestic still-life. A giant screen, flooded with Adam Sinclair’s colourful nd
convulsive animations, supplies a shifting backdrop. Costumes suspend us somewhere between
Tudor England and the present day, the formality of pleated ruffs and Violet’s own ribboned
pigtails and pinafore absurd in the face of the coming apocalypse.

Andrew Gourlay conducts an account glowing with detail and life. Richard Burkhard swings from
absolute control to collapse as patriarch Felix, and there are worlds contained in both Andrew
MacKenzie-Wicks’ querulous Clockkeeper and Frances Gregory’s loyal retainer Laura. But the
show belongs to Anna Dennis’s Violet. Voraciously eating cereal out of a packet, a woman-child full
of mischief and wisdom, the soprano soars through Coult’s score without ever seeming to alight –
the strange, still point at the centre of a collapsing musical universe.

Performances remaining on 5 June (Snape Maltings) and 23 June (Hackney Empire)