John Corigliano The Lord of Cries Anthony Roth Costanzo et al; Odyssey Opera Chorus; Boston Modern Orchestra Project/Gil Rose Pentatone PTC 5187 008 (CD/SACD) 137:37 mins (2 discs)
From Orpheus (Monteverdi, Birtwistle, Gluck) to Idomeneus (Mozart) and the Trojans (Berlioz), Greek mythology has proved a fertile ground for opera, while Nadia Boulanger took inspiration from Greece’s historic landscape, using the ruins of Mycenae as the setting for La ville morte. Mark Adamo therefore follows a well-trodden path with his retelling of Euripides’s The Bacchae – and promptly kicks up the ground by transplanting characters from... Bram Stoker’s Dracula. It takes a bold composer to set such a story and John Corigliano is more than up to the task. The Lord of Cries opens with a prologue by Dionysus, here sung by the ever-impressive Anthony Roth Costanzo (the US countertenor now synonymous with the titular role of Philip Glass’s opera Akhnaten). As he ponders the people of Thebes’s (in this case, Victorian England) dishonour, the Boston Modern Orchestra Project lets loose, depicting riotous street life. These scene-setting programmatic interludes are very effective (eg. rhythmic brass suggesting lightning), although the sound is flattened by the recording – a fate similarly suffered by the Odyssey Opera Chorus. Corigliano gives a nod to operatic tradition with lush moments in ‘Hush, darling: hush’, expertly sung by soprano Kathryn Henry, with an enjoyable musical howling motif representing Jonathan (David Portillo). It’s one of several whimsical morsels: elsewhere Corigliano creates a cipher in honour of B-A-C-C-H-A-E, following Bach’s tradition in using B= B flat, A, C, H=B natural. Further staging of this intriguing 2021 work (commissioned and premiered by The Santa Fe Opera) – with its unexpected ending – is eagerly awaited.
Claire Jackson