English National Opera could not be more up to date if it tried — and it does try — than it manages to be with Nico Muhly’s Two Boys. The work, to a libretto by Craig Lucas, co-commissioned with the Metropolitan Opera, received its world premiere in a London Coliseum production by Bartlett Sher, conducted by Rumon Gamba, that has its last three performances this week. The theme is the internet, and chatrooms, and their catastrophic consequences for the online-addicted young. The basis is the true story of a young boy stabbed near a Manchester shopping centre by an only slightly older boy. They had met online, where the younger boy posed as a woman and spun a web of fantasies in order to seduce the elder into killing him. The case has overtones of a German incident in which a man sought a partner online for consenting offline cannibalism, as well as instances of devious, geeky youngsters hacking into government files and the voluntary degradations of reality television.
It is all summoned into operatic form by a 29-year-old American composer (and a much older, gay American writer) whose life, as he says, has been roughly contemporary with the internet’s. Musically eclectic, intellectually exuberant — a fast-talking New Yorker — and exuberantly gay, Muhly is the most fashionable of composers. He has worked with Björk, with Philip Glass, with Stephen Daldry, and brings his loud lustre and topicality of themes to St Martin’s Lane.
The two-act, 100-minute work certainly has éclat. And it does not really have longueurs, though there is a dramatic torpor built into the Glass-like repetitive patterning that is Muhly’s basic manner. It is a more sophisticated minimalism than Glass’s, and punctuated by brutally vitalising gestures of a quite different sort; he is indebted to Britten, too, and even Anglican church music. Yet this evocation of a world in which looking at screens is more compelling than looking at people is articulated mainly by a sequence of often melancholy little riffs, jogging on the spot like television library-music stings. Taking it with a text that is all too finely tuned to everyday speech, and to chatroom speak, with its ugly abbreviations (a language of which the main character ventures a critique), one may feel a deficit of artistic substance and satisfaction.
Muhly’s best invention is reserved for the chorus and its orchestral accompaniment. There are some tremendous tuttis, not least the concluding passacaglia, and it is a stroke of inspiration to deploy the massed voices as an image of the world wide web itself. Combined with the large contribution of the design team, 59 Productions, whose laser projections play continually across the gauzed steel towers of Michael Yeargan’s gloomily cavernous set, the choral writing brilliantly conveys the newfangled, relentless, threatening global babble. Muhly seems to have learnt from Ligeti and his weblike “micropolyphony”.
It is a clever idea to identify opera’s traditional use of masquerade with the disguises of internet users
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As a former chorister, Muhly can be expected to write gratefully for solo voices, too, but he is rarely willing to rise above the level of modern opera’s habitual arioso declamation. The vocal lines are skilled but samey. They are well projected by the principals, especially the young tenor Nicky Spence, remarkably convincing as the 16-year-old Brian, whose online entanglements drive the whodunnit, positively film-noirish plot. The treble Joseph Beesley, as the “real” Jake, who entraps Brian (and is to be distinguished from the baritone Jonathan McGovern, a “virtual” Jake), is excellent; and Mary Bevan as Jake’s sister,
Heather Shipp as a fantasy secret agent contracting out killings, and Robert Gleadow as the fantasy psychopath Peter, are striking dark presences.
The character at the drama’s centre, the detective Anne Strawson, formed by an analogue world, but trying valiantly to decipher insidious digital crime, is a missed opportunity. That experienced mezzo Susan Bickley brings her finesse to the part and captures the poignancy of the unpartnered, unillusioned Anne, a childless inspector living with her doddery, though open-minded, mother (Valerie Reid). But the opera desperately needs a heartfelt aria for her — something perhaps on the lines of the scientist Oppenheimer’s “Batter my heart” in John Adams’s Doctor Atomic, a post-minimalist opera that must have had an impact on Muhly.
Two Boys never takes us far enough musically inside its characters; its impetus tends to the impressionistic and sensational. But it is a clever idea to identify opera’s traditional use of masquerade with the disguises of internet users, and to realise these fantasies in three dimensions (albeit risking confusion for the audience). And the depiction of the way the boastful romancing of childhood can run free these days of any kind of reality principle, and have a lethal or, in this case, near-lethal upshot, is touching, tragic and timely.
From a young American with a growing reputation in this country to a 102½-year-old American composer revered here. Elliott Carter’s Conversations, for piano, percussion and chamber orchestra — his third commission from the Aldeburgh Festival in as many years — was unveiled at Snape Maltings by the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group under Oliver Knussen, with Colin Currie as percussionist and the festival’s director, Pierre-Laurent Aimard, as the other dextrous soloist. A single movement lasting a mere seven minutes, but with a conceptual density implying far more pages of score, it represents Carter’s late, late style in its tersest distillation. No words are wasted in a conversation notable nonetheless for urbanity and wit, for a vigorous responsiveness and a lack of any wistfulness.
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In his three years at Aldeburgh, Aimard has broadened the scope of the deeply English festival with admirable perspectives of contemporary French music. The London Sinfonietta’s account under Peter Eotvos, at the Maltings’ Britten Studio, of Pierre Boulez’s ferociously inventive and sustained electroacoustic essay ...explosante-fixe... could only be described as insanely exhilarating.