Satyagraha

I'm afraid I'm already breaking my undertaking not to post negative comments. Imagine you are a child, messing around on the family piano. You find the chord of C major and then work down - C major, B flat major, A flat major, G major - bingo! You have Andrew Lloyd Webber's "Why should I die" sequence from "Jesus Christ Superstar", which as you may recall, goes on for quite a while. It is as nothing compared to what I heard last night at EnglishNational Opera - the same four chord sequence played for the first twenty five minutes of the British premier of Philip Glass's Satyagraha. This was followed by about fifteen minutes of a three chord sequence and then topped off nicely with a chunk of frenetic woodwind action.

During this time the singers intoned some quite pleasant, defiantly tonal lines in Sanskrit- without sur titles, just some projected scene headings. (Funny that, ENO has a policy of opera in English with surtitles). The director, Phelim McDermott, from the wonderful Improbable Theatre, did what he could, but was reduced to making the cast wander round in a kind of African Noh play torpor, which induced in me a torpor that lead to sleep, snoring and disapproval from the person next to me. I felt obliged to leave at the first interval.

Philip Glass writes extremely clever and sometimes mesmerising systems music, the ENO chorus and orchestra were as impressive as ever - the last ten minutes of act one seemed to have no gap for breathing, and the singers and woodwind players pulled it off magnificently. But in the end, is it opera? I think not, it is some form of stylised oratorio, totally lacking in the musical and thus theatrical dynamic which defines good music theatre of any type. Please, ENO, look around you at the plethora of wonderful writers and composers in the UK, and give them a chance. The last homegrown "new" opera, (and I don't count the recent Gaddafi experiment) was Turnage's "Silver Tassie" - A long time ago, but genuine opera and hugely successful.