A passionate and poignant lament for the brutality of war
The Silver Tassie Barbican Hall
After the premiere of The Silver Tassie at ENO in 2000, I speculated that it was a work of the first rank that would stand the test of time. A revival and a recording confirmed me in this view, but I was disturbed to read in the programme for this concert version on Saturday night that the opera had not been performed since 2002. The weekend of the Armistice centenary was a timely moment for a reappraisal.
The source of the opera is a play by Sean O’casey, adapted into an excellent libretto by Amanda Holden. It tells of Harry Heegan, a bumptious amateur football hero in Dublin, who returns crippled from the Western Front. Confined to a wheelchair, he loses his girlfriend, he loses all faith. He is fed clichés such as “where there’s life, there’s hope”, but he is beyond consolation. He might as well be dead – and for what? It’s as simple and brutal as that.
Mark-anthony Turnage’s score is one of his best, masterly in its economy and vividness. Each of the opera’s four scenes moves swiftly and concisely, the overall mood brazenly impassioned and febrile, threaded with shards of popular songs and dances and propelled by jagged, jazzy rhythms, but never losing its cutting edge.
Most striking of all – perhaps one of the great episodes in postwar opera – is the expressionistic second scene, almost a self-contained cantata, in which a satanic priest, “The Croucher”, intones a black liturgy of apocalyptic doom, in counterpoint to platoons of exhausted soldiers receiving letters from home and attempting a game of football. The music here is both awesomely magnificent and gently poignant, with choral writing every bit as powerful as Britten’s in Billy Budd.
This concert performance, rudimentarily staged by Kenneth Richardson, suffered only from being excessively loud: the BBC Symphony Orchestra, forcefully conducted by Ryan Wigglesworth, provided such relentless aural assault that in the interval I felt obliged to move from the mid stalls to the back of the circle.
The cast coped manfully with this battery. As Harry Heegan, Ashley Riches couldn’t efface memories of the young Gerald Finley, but he sang very well nevertheless, and there was staunch support from Sally Matthews, Brindley Sherratt and Alexander Robin Baker among others – not to mention the excellent BBC Singers and Finchley Children’s Music Group. No attempt was made by those playing Irish to offer an Irish accent: these working-class Dubliners sounded very Home Counties. A pity, I think.