DAVID MELLOR CLASSICAL

Violet Hackney Empire, London HHHHH

There was a genuine buzz of excitement and anticipation as Tom Coult and Alice Birch’s Violet began. Normally, contemporary British music is attended dutifully, but without any especially strong expectation of anything memorable emerging. A mood well summed up by the gleefully cynical suggestion of Sir

Thomas Beecham that he was founding a Society for the Second Performance of Contemporary British Music because so few got one. But the chorus of approval from the critics and others that greeted Violet’s Covid-delayed debut at Aldeburgh a few weeks ago has totally changed the mood.

Even more encouragingly, those, like myself, who are excited at its opening were probably even more so having experienced it.

Birch’s story of an unhappily married, downtrodden woman Violet (Anna Dennis, left), all but imprisoned by her awful husband

Felix (Richard Burkhard), and closely supervised by another of British opera’s creepy housekeepers, Laura (Frances Gregory), is continually absorbing.

Poor Violet is the first one to notice that the days are getting shorter, as an hour, and sometimes more, is lopped off the clock. This is kept up to speed in our view, as a cricket scorer does on the village green, by The Clockkeeper (Andrew MacKenzie Wicks).

By the end, there is so little time left in any given day that it’s as if the end of the world is approaching. How are Coult and Birch going to deal with that one, I asked myself.

Answer: by taking evasive action. Entertainingly, but inexplicably, the opera ends with a game show, full of sinister questions.

I’m not going to pretend, to be as kind as I can, that Birch’s libretto yields up all its secrets the first time around. But I would gladly see it again, and that lies at the heart of the work’s appeal. One of the reasons I would is the flair and imagination of Coult’s score. He does a remarkable job with his 12 instrumentalists from the London Sinfonietta, under the exceptional baton of Andrew Gourlay.

The ticking clocks are worthy of Shostakovich in his 15th Symphony; high praise indeed.