Good news from Almeida Opera: the second of the three chamber operas being staged under the aegis of the Genesis Project is a marked improvement on the first. Actually that's an understatement: Thwaite, with a score by Jürgen Simpson to a libretto by Simon Doyle, is an incomparably better work than its predecessor, conveying the sense of a real symbiotic relationship between the words and the music.
A thwaite, if you didn't know, is a forest clearing used for cultivation, and such a place is the location of Simpson and Doyle's bleak and sometimes violent tale about life among a group of refugees. They are fleeing some nameless disaster: religious or political persecution perhaps, or nuclear war; it is never quite made clear. They have gathered together, starving and desperate, to await the arrival of a new messiah who will deliver them from their fate.
They make a motley bunch: tramps, clowns and women of a certain age, all with strange names (Biddle, Quain, Firk, Moorish). There is a Beckettian strangeness about many of their exchanges, as they squabble over food, cross-examine new arrivals, and battle for power and moral authority. One character has her tongue ripped out, there is a brace of poisonings, and stabbings, and an opera that begins with seven characters ends up with two.
Doyle's text does sometimes succumb to what might be called the poetic fallacy of librettists - the idea that words for singing need to be high-flown and image-filled - but generally his text is spare, direct and effective, even though not enough of it comes across clearly.
Simpson was a pupil of Kevin Volans in Dublin and his music seems to have inherited some of his teacher's strangeness; the scoring makes prominent though never overbearing use of heavy brass, but also contains great delicacy.
Dan Jemmett's staging - in a set by Dick Bird that makes prominent use of a burnt-out ice cream van - is surreally, viscerally direct. The performances, led by Nicole Tibbels's viciously manipulative Blane, Marie Angel's much abused Biddle and Jonathan Gunthorpe's ineptly scheming Quain, and conducted by Philip Walsh, are wonderfully intense. Well worth catching.
