Press Coverage
Ravenhill and Nyman - Take your seats for jazzed-up Monteverdi
Playwright Mark Ravenhill and composer Michael Nyman have given a new spin to a classic opera, discovers Nicola Christie.
On the surface they don’t have much in common: Michael Nyman, composer of the “killingly popular” – his words – soundtrack to The Piano, grandee of the UK music world now trying to get his operas onto serious UK stages, and Mark Ravenhill, risqué playwright who brought Shopping and Fucking to our stages in 1996 and has continued to challenge audiences’ tolerance levels ever since. But Monteverdi’s Coronation of Poppea has unleashed in the two artists a rather extraordinary new venture that, if cared for properly, could fuel a surge in opera-going, and opera-writing, that could be very exciting.
OperaUpClose has big ambitions
By Nick Kimberley
The company’s next production is of Monteverdi’s The Coronation of Poppea, premiered in Venice in 1643. It takes a sardonic look at the state of Rome under Emperor Nero, who will stop at nothing to get his hands on Poppea, the object of his desire. The production will be directed by controversial playwright Mark Ravenhill (Shopping and F***ing and Mother Clap’s Molly House)...
...Not that Ravenhill is seeking to replicate the baroque sounds that Monteverdi imagined (a matter of some conjecture, since no definitive score survives). In collaboration with music director Alex Silverman, Ravenhill has opted for a jazz-inflected trio of piano, saxophone and double bass. Hardly less radical is the decision to include an aria specially written for the occasion by Michael Nyman. That, though, is not so different from the practice of Monteverdi’s era: scholars believe that, while the opera is largely Monteverdi’s, several other composers probably made contributions, including the sumptuous love duet that closes the opera, casting a glowing light on Nero and Poppeaplayed by Zoe Bonner, who have schemed, connived and murdered their way to erotic ecstasy…
...Their climactic duet has worried Ravenhill, not musically but historically: “The original audience would have been more aware than we are today of the irony of the duet. They would have known what Roman historians tell us about this marriage: it wasn’t going to last. Poppea’s first child died young; then when she became pregnant again, Nero kicked her in the stomach, she lost the baby and died as a result.”
It was to bridge that gap in a modern audience’s knowledge that Ravenhill commissioned Nyman’s aria. Sceptics will probably wail that OperaUpClose’s whole project is a misguided attempt to second-guess operatic history. Others will find the results stimulating and refreshing. Yet Ravenhill insists that he’s not deliberately setting out to make Poppea fit with any notions of broadening opera’s appeal…
...The Coronation of Poppea is in rep May 5-9 at London’s Little Opera House at the King’s Head, N1 (020 7478 0160; kingsheadtheatre.com); Michael Nyman’s opera, Facing Goya, is released by MN Records in April.