A Flowering Tree is the sixth stage work from John Adams, and another collaboration with director Peter Sellars, with whom he created Nixon in China and The Death of Klinghoffer, those lodestars of what became known as CNN opera.
This latest work, premiered in Vienna last November as part of Sellars's globally itinerant, Mozart-inspired New Crowned Hope festival, is a long way from that news-bulletin aesthetic. It is based on a 2,000-year-old South Indian folk story about a peasant girl, Kumudha, who finds she is able to transform herself into a beautiful tree so that her starving mother can sell her flowers. She thus attracts the eye of a prince and marries him, but his jealous sister attacks her while she is transformed, and she is left limbless, half-human and half-tree, until the wandering prince finds and heals her.
Adams and Sellars claim parallels with Mozart's Magic Flute, but these go only so far. This fairytale is far more simple, more linear than Mozart's - and Adams takes too long to tell it. There are only three solo singers, and one of those is a narrator. This means lots of long monologues, which make the work feel more like oratorio than opera; and there is precious little hint of Mozart's wit, either.
Yet, within this static framework, much of the love music is touched with convincing passion, and the best of those choruses - sung in Spanish by the dynamic Schola Cantorum de Venezuela, flown over from Caracas especially - dance along with juggernaut force. Conducted by the composer, the music is unmistakably Adams, with his trademark high-percussion glitter sprinkled liberally, but with a darker palette than usual. The most distinctive sounds come when the texture thins to reveal two tentative recorders, such as at Kumudha's first transformation.
As usual, the Barbican is the place where we get to see a high-profile show from overseas; as usual, it is mounted in the concert hall, so that only a semi-staged approximation is possible. Sellars's adapted staging, acted out on a high platform behind the players of the London Symphony Orchestra and involving three Javanese classical dancers who function partly as the singers' doppelgangers, tells the story clearly enough. The three singers are committed, Jessica Rivera sounding radiant as Kumudha, though their blurry diction makes the surtitles essential. Strange, though, how, as his association with a theatre director lengthens, Adams' music seems to become less and less theatrical.
