The mezzo-soprano Tammy Coil sang the part of Marie and Angel 2 with a vibrant voice Isaiah Bell brought a silken tenor to the part of John and Angel 3. They double as characters in the medieval story - the Boy, Marie (sister of Agnès) and Marie’s husband, John - and create an ornamental frame that, paradoxically, pulls the listener in, even as it announces the artifice of the work. Three angels flit in and out of the action. “Written on Skin” is a physiological experience as much as an aesthetic one.īut the work also delights by its playful, unquestionably modern, structure. In the scene in which Agnès, unknowingly, eats her lover’s heart, her vocal line remains implacable, as she politely answers her husband’s insistent queries: “It tastes good.” But in the orchestra, sliding motifs followed by clicking and popping sounds paint the food’s progress down Agnès’s throat and into her digestive system. A scene in which the Protector (the supremely assured bass-baritone Evan Hughes) surveys the delights of harvest - including “grape crushing” and “hot blood from a pig’s throat” - opens with a rustic dance with boozy violence in its belly.
In the seduction scene, their vocal lines follow each other like a finger lovingly retracing a line in a drawing. There is a gold-leaf gleam to the duets between Agnès, a soprano sung by the resplendent Lauren Snouffer, and the Boy, sung by the glowing countertenor Augustine Mercante. Benjamin’s writing comes through especially sharply. In concert version, the visual power of Mr.
#Ossia seven strophes for a literary drone full
Outbursts of the full ensemble are rare, but terrifying. The large symphony orchestra, supplemented with unusual instruments like glass harmonium, viola da gamba and bongos, becomes a vast palette on which Mr. Benjamin, a British composer, is a master of color and detail and in this subject, with its themes of illumination and enlightenment, his music has found its home.
But when she hears what she has eaten, her reaction is triumph: now nothing can take the delicious taste from her mouth. When the Protector learns of her infidelity - in a manner arranged, with cruel deliberation, by Agnès - he murders the Boy and serves his heart to Agnès at dinner. The Boy and his art awaken something in Agnès: emboldened by the concept of invention, she seduces the Boy and inserts her new self into the book. The Protector enlists a young illuminator of manuscripts, the Boy, to create a monument to him in the form of a book. Illiterate, subservient and pure, she is his prize possession. It tells the story of a powerful medieval landowner, the Protector, and his young wife, Agnès. “Written on Skin” is a psychologically gripping, emotionally heart-pounding and viscerally satisfying drama that throws up moral questions that linger long after its 90-minute run. On Monday evening, a concert performance of “Written on Skin” at the Tanglewood Festival of Contemporary Music, conducted by the composer, gave an American audience the first hint as to what the fuss is all about. In the past year, it has been staged in London, Amsterdam, Toulouse, Munich and Vienna, each time bringing audiences to their feet and leaving critics to pull out superlatives they hadn’t thought they’d ever use in the context of new opera. Within minutes of the premiere of George Benjamin’s “Written on Skin,” at the Aix-en-Provence Festival last summer, opera houses around the world jostled for production rights to this darkly erotic opera about a love triangle in medieval Provence, set to a searing text by Martin Crimp.
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