Page 442 - Aldeburgh Festival 2022 FINAL COVERAGE BOOK

The premiere of the first opera by composer Tom Coult and librettist Alice

Birch was scheduled for Aldeburgh in 2020, but due to the pandemic has

only now reached the Snape Maltings stage.

The result has been well worth waiting for. Coult says in a programme note

that Birch’s style seemed to map directly on what he’d look for in an

operatic collaborator. He has responded to her text with a score drawing on

just thirteen members of the London Sinfonietta, conducted with easy

command by Andrew Gourlay.

Full of the sounds of bells and metronomes, plus a number of other unusual

instruments and techniques, Coult’s score also includes electronic

interludes. Most importantly, it avoids rhetoric or grandiosity, utilising a
multitude of subtle effects and maintaining interest throughout its span –

its momentum never flags.

The subject is a macabre fantasy. The unhappily married Violet lives an

existence ruled by the clock; then, one day, she notices that the day has lost

an hour – the clock has jumped from 11.59pm to 1.00am.

The phenomenon then repeats, only with more time lost each day: five

hours disappear, then seven, and so on. Soon, her husband Felix and their

maid Laura register it too.

Meanwhile, we learn that local natural phenomena and human behaviour

have become extreme: floods, fires, violence and rioting are now common;

all are ineluctably drawn into this apparently universal cataclysm.

Not even the so-called Clock-keeper can explain what is going on, offering

no more than a warning of further time-loss and disasters to come. Violet

alone seems strangely elated by the uncertainty that surrounds her.