The Cenci/Almeida Opera at the Almeida, N1
By Rupert Christiansen
Saturday 19 July 1997
Electronic Telegraph
GIORGIO Battistelli is an Italian composer in his mid-forties who composes in a style that was fashionable in the 1960s but is now outmoded. Influenced by the collagiste style of Varèse and Berio, his works sound like random collections of strange noises, plinks and plonks, wheeees and brrrrs, some of them electronically amplified or synthesised, plus a lot of atmospheric grunting, hissing and squeaking. There is not much in the way of melody, structure or logical development.
Before Colonel Bufton-Tufton of the Society for the Preservation of Jolly Good Tunes (in C major) starts huffing in protest, I should say that while it was being performed I was totally gripped by his new opera, The Cenci. Based on Antonin Artaud's adaptation of Shelley's verse tragedy - a load of tosh set in Renaissance Rome, dripping with Gothic gore and Catholicism - it lasts a little over an hour and has an undeniably gripping intensity.
The text is not sung but declaimed, over an orchestral accompaniment (conducted by David Parry), with a certain amount of rhythmic distortion and overemphasis. The effect is closer to that of melodramas like Strauss's Enoch Arden than to the Sprechgesang of Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire.
I was a sucker for its spookiness and unabashed flamboyance of style and gesture, quite brilliantly realised by a cast of four actors. As the slavering and incestuous Count Cenci, Ian McDiarmid gave a magnificent display of higher ham, rolling his eyes and baring his breast, as he descended into paroxysms of decadence. Opposite him Anastasia Hille was equally impressive as the raped and vengeful Beatrice.
They were strongly directed by Nick Ward, whose production fell just the right side of camp. Evocatively eerie imagery (a mysterious pair of doors, an orgy of naked legs, a disembodied hand carrying a lighted candle, a banqueting table laid with fruit) was projected on to a pair of screens. Nobody giggled, though at times I felt they should have done.
After I came out, I realised that I had been had - the whole thing probably was little more than hot air, negligible as music, phoney as drama. You simply can't take it seriously, but that didn't stop me enjoying the show while it lasted in the theatre.
The performance was followed by an interactive sound-and-video installation, based on images connected with the opera. It might have amused a five-year-old for two minutes, but it didn't impress me and I can't see what it added to the work's overall impact.
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