Lewis Carroll’s day job was as an Oxford mathematician, if a conservative Victorian one. His enthusiasm for ridiculing the new abstract maths was evident in the knots and riddles, never explained, in Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. As the Hatter tells Alice, who complains she can’t have “more” tea since she hasn’t yet had any, “You mean you can’t take less… it’s very easy to take more than nothing.” It all fits with the theory that the Hatter was a satire on the Irish mathematician William Rowan Hamilton, whose work on imaginary numbers remains a cornerstone of modern science.
A faint echo of all this sounds when you look at Gerald Barry’s score for Alice’s Adventures Under Ground, based on episodes compiled from both books. It was given its European premiere in a semi-staging at the Barbican last Monday, conducted by Thomas Adès, rapturously received, crazily virtuosic and full of laughs. The outer impression is of chaos, the inner mechanisms detailed and stringent. The drama appears to rattle on without drawing breath, coming in at under an hour instead of the 70 minutes estimated. In truth there are several big emphatic silences, every bit as carefully timed as the music they interrupt: key points in the work’s architecture. In addition to all the frenzy, there’s a poetic, slowly lurching waltz for the soppy Red Knight and White Knight (Joshua Bloom and Mark Stone) and a tender and elegiac ending, which departs from Carroll’s original.
Despite having interviewed Barry, and knowing his 2011 opera based on Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, I was unprepared for the dense lunacy of this new opera. If anything it’s even funnier than Earnest. Barry has conjured the inner hysteria of Carroll’s writings by using infinitesimal precision, both in method and execution. With Barbara Hannigan, who else, in the ferociously difficult title part, waving her arms, slouching, twirling, one of a dazzling seven-strong cast taking on multiple roles, it all sounds like a riot of scales and arpeggios in recognisable, almost friendly harmonies. Barry has said he based much of it on the piano studies of Beethoven’s contemporary, Carl Czerny.
Close up you see the myriad decisions, as if of a thousand brush strokes, that constitute even the briefest, silliest-sounding music. A quartet of bottles (the ever engaging Allan Clayton, who doubles as White Rabbit, with Peter Tantsits, Bloom and Stone) shows this. They sing “Drink me” countless times at super-rapid speed with some 17 changes of tempo and dynamic markings that vary from “raucous”, “rough”, “savage”, “violent” and “pressing”. Try making all those distinctions in the space of maybe a minute. These singers did, later proving themselves equally distinguished as cake (“yum yum yum”) and as the Duchess’s carelessly bounced baby (“wow wow wow wow”).
Each singer’s talent is used to the gymnastic utmost. The throaty persuasions of contralto Hilary Summers – Miss Prism in Barry’s Earnest – excelled as White Queen and Dormouse. Mezzo-soprano Allison Cook retorted wittily as Red Queen and Mock Turtle. Typically of Barry, familiar melodies are plundered, including Beethoven’s Ode to Joy and It’s a Long Way to Tipperary. Other composers are welcomed into his sound world: the swirling brass fanfares of Janácek, the surging energy of Borodin’s Polovtsian Dances. The opera is scored for the same forces as Mozart’s “Jupiter” Symphony, with extras such as low woodwind, bass trombone and tuba, two wind machines and tubular bells. The Britten Sinfonia, under Adès’s masterly direction, played with awe-inspiring finesse. An imaginative director should have no difficulty – well, OK, only the usual – transforming this into the fully staged opera it cries out to be. Who will dare?
In Stockholm, a single word was emblazoned on the banner outside the city’s neoclassical konserthus: Knussen. Blue-grey and monolithic outside, red and old gold within, this 1926 hall may be best known as the venue for the Nobel prize award ceremony – taking place next week – but its year-round purpose is as home to the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra, which holds an annual Composer festival. In the event’s 30-year history, Oliver Knussen (b1952) is only the third Briton featured (Tippett and Adès are the other two). Last weekend Knussen’s sensuous, delicately textured music rang out round the auditorium, conducted by the composer and played with keen expertise by the orchestra, performing his music for the first time. His output is fairly small, intricate, chiselled. He has always devoted generous time to supporting younger composers and conducting internationally. He meets his own high artistic standards, rather than deadlines. Each completed score is hard-won and precious.
The opening concert featured The Way to Castle Yonder (1990), a “potpourri” of orchestral interludes from the opera Higglety Pigglety Pop!, full of deep, glowing colours unique to Knussen’s aural treasury. Clio Gould was soloist in the Violin Concerto (2002), in which the orchestra, too, act as soloists while the violin, elegant and febrile, soars and arcs ethereally high above. It’s a beguiling piece that should be in every violinist’s repertoire. The ghostly, antiphonal Music for a Puppet Court and the Symphony No 3, full of elusive colours, especially the mix of celesta, guitar and harp, completed the concert, an evening of variety and depth, warmly received by the audience.
Back in the UK, a burgeoning composer, the Russian-British Alissa Firsova (b1986), was celebrated by the Tippett Quartet. In a high-spirited concert of Mendelssohn and Dvorák, they gave the world premiere of Firsova’s Tennyson Fantasy for quartet and narrator. Actor Finbar Lynch read excerpts from the three Tennyson poems that had inspired Firsova’s three-part work. It seemed to start in a conventional, tonal world but moved steadily into stranger terrain, ending with a long, urgent passacaglia of sombre beauty. I’d like to hear it again, which is praise enough.
Star ratings (out of 5)
Alice’s Adventures Under Ground ★★★★
Composer festival ★★★★
Tippett Quartet ★★★★
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