It was the end of the Henze weekend and the start of the Barbican’s Present Voices, a new series of UK premieres of contemporary operas in concert performance. And a work of rare beauty was born. Hans Werner Henze has written 14 operas; the latest, Phaedra, given its premiere in Berlin in 2007, drew warm and prolonged ovations, in the composer’s presence, from a near-capacity audience.
Just two acts, some 75 minutes, an exquisite retelling by Christian Lehnert of the Phaedra myth, and a score in which a string quartet meets the voices of wind soloists and percussion: this late work is one of Henze’s most fresh, most moving and perfectly conceived works. And the Ensemble Modern and vocal soloists, conducted by Michael Boder, performed it as though they had known it all their lives.
The short scenes of the first act move from Theseus’s labyrinth to the love and then hate of Phaedra for her stepson Hippolytus — and on to his violent death. We are drawn in by the sheer intensity of Henze’s musical distillation, his unerring dramatic shaping and the acuteness of his ever-sensuous ear. Threads of instrumental sound are woven with the glorious lyricism and power of the vocal writing. Alto sax, cor anglais, harp and piano clothe Phaedra’s desire; and Maria Riccarda Wesseling’s burnished mezzo fuses love and hate, death and desire in her florid writing. The “shimmering blue, shimmering grass” of Henze’s forest is lit too by the eloquent soprano of Marlis Petersen’s Aphrodite.
But it’s the second act, written after the composer’s near-death experience in 2005, that’s the real miracle. As Hippolytus (John Mark Ainsley) is transformed by Artemis (the versatile counter-tenor Axel Kohler) into a mystical bird, his bewildered and existential self-questioning, outstandingly recreated by Ainsley, is an imaginative tour de force. It’s followed, magically, by moments of electro-acoustic bruitage, composed for Henze by Francesco Antonioni, as the forces of Nature destroy and then renew in the rebirth of dance. I can’t wait to see the first British staging of this great work.