Charming, but Haydn’s music alone is enough

Music and dance The Creation Garsington

The ambition of Garsington Opera is simply astounding. For its final production of the season, it took on nothing less than the creation of the universe, as described in Haydn’s oratorio The Creation. The story unfolds with majestic radiant optimism, all the way from Chaos to the creation of Man, Lord of Creation, with every scale of bird and beast in between. At the back of the stage, raised in tiers on either side, was the choir of Garsington Chorus, with the Garsington Orchestra in between. In front, separated from the musicians by what looked like the frame of a Gothic altarpiece, was an extraordinary spectacle.

Mark Baldwin, artistic director of Rambert, had been commissioned to express this greatest of all stories in choreographed movement, and seized his chance. At times more than 50 dancers were on stage, from the company and the Rambert School.

But what does it mean, to “express” the creation of stars, whales and worms in dance? Baldwin says in the programme note that “it’s important not to be too literal”, but the problem is Haydn’s music is so often literal, in the most charmingly naive way. Just occasionally the dance joined the music in amusing innocence, as when one dancer undulated across the stage for the moment where Haydn describes the worm “in sinuous trace”. At other times, Baldwin went deliberately against the music’s imagery. When the music hailed the eagle which “soars aloft” one dancer got as close to the floor as is possible, without actually lying down.

The general style was an exuberant polyphonic movement, of a graceful kind balanced nicely between abstraction and 18th-century poise, a fast-moving trio over here set against 10 dancers in slow unison motion over there. There was a similar ambiguity in the dancers’ befrilled and beruffed leotards. Half were in black, half in grey, but not divided according to sex; Baldwin was clearly keen to subvert the Bible’s embarrassing sexual politics. At the moment where Adam praises his “graceful consort”, couples stepped forward one by one to perform tender duets. Hetero couples were in the minority.

At moments like these one caught a meaning. But often the swirl of movement was distracting, especially at the beginning, where the awesome slowness of Haydn’s Representation of Chaos was ruined. To bring dancers in here, but to eliminate them at the busiest moment of Part 3, just seemed perverse. The Gothic arches of the design were a puzzling backdrop for this Enlightenment work.

As for Douglas Boyd’s direction of the orchestra, it was sometimes too fleet and light to catch the grandeur of the piece. But the eloquence of the three soloists Sarah Tynan, James Gilchrist and Neil Davies, and the fervency of the young Garsington Chorus, supplied the necessary emotional heft. In all it was a brave enterprise with the occasional touching moment, which reminded us this is one work where the music really is all you need.