Barry reviews

If you’ve heard the chunterings of the bass Lady Bracknell in Gerald Barry’s The Importance of Being Earnest, you’ll have some idea of what to expect here. But only up to a point: Barry is never predictable for long, veering off at alarming tangents, and unfathomable in the way he chooses to set his texts. The two monodramas based on Beethoven’s letters here always avoid the obvious.

Surely this is not only the best operatic treatment of Oscar Wilde since Strauss’s Salome, but also one of the few absolutely essential operas of the last 20 years. I thought so at its UK stage premiere in the Royal Opera’s Linbury Theatre, and this recording of the Barbican performance which preceded it confirms that impression. Gerald Barry’s acerbic, brass-and-wind dominated Earnest brings out the violence behind the epigrams – not as a subtext but as screaming, explicit expressionism, fully backed up by score injunctions.