Contemporary collaboration
Diana Damrau and Iain Bell
Damrau doesn’t sing much contemporary music, with one major exception: the music of Iain Bell (left), a British composer born in London in 1980.
His 2005 Daughters of Britannia was written for Damrau just a year after he first heard her sing. Inspired by her acting gifts and ‘crystalclear diction’, Bell wrote a song cycle portraying five historical and mythological British heroines: Boudicca, Maid Marian, Morgause, Guinevere and Lady Godiva.
In 2013, Bell had made his first foray into opera, A Harlot’s Progress, based on Hogarth engravings, starring Damrau as Moll Hackabout. ‘Bell has wisely made the climax of his opera a huge solo scene for Moll, part cradle song, part mad scene, and Damrau turns it into a harrowing musical and dramatic showpiece,’ wrote the Financial Times.
Two other song-cycles for Damrau include Aurora and The Hidden Place.
Ill health prevented Damrau from giving Aurora’s premiere at the 2018 Proms, so a replacement stepped in; a year later, at the Barbican, The Hidden Place’s first outing, a decade after Bell wrote the piece, also had to be postponed, being premiered later in 2019.
Damrau’s only other notable foray into new music was in Lorin Maazel’s 1984, when she played the Drunken Woman/ Gym Instructress in the 2005 premiere. However, that’s perhaps best forgotten. Although the critics saved some warm words for the cast, they comprehensively panned the opera. Back to Bell, it appears, is the answer.