My last visit to the Buxton Festival was a mixed affair – John Casken’s new work The Shackled King, a music drama based on the King Lear story, was the main ‘second half’ work, and with it in the first half a compilation called “Brunnhilde’s Dream”, a sequence of songs by Wagner, Mendelssohn, Schubert, Schumann, Zemlinsky, Berg, Szymanowski, Henze, and Muller-Hermann, devised by Barry Millington. Impressively, both works featured Sir John Tomlinson, bass; and Rozanna Madylus, mezzo-soprano, with musicians from the group ‘Counterpoise’ – violin, trumpet, saxophone and clarinet, and piano.
The great treat in all this was hearing John Tomlinson, now well over 70, singing some of ‘Wotan’s Farewell’ from Die Walkure, accompanied by a piano. Beautifully sung, even though his voice is frayed and not what it was, this was unexpected and wonderful. I enjoyed the sequence of songs in Brunnhilde’s Dream, but they, or I, could have done with surtitles or at least flagging up where we had got to – I lost track some of the time and one really needed to know some of the details of what the Brunnhilde figure was singing about
‘The Shackled King’ was interesting, though that was only intermittently due to Casken’s music. John Tomlinson played Lear, and Rozanna Madylus a combination of Cordelia, Regan, Goneril and the Fool, using a combination of spoken, sprechstimme and sung voices. Tomlinson projected the spoken words of Lear excellently, and with real power, and Rozanna Madylus’s acting was energetic and full of interest. I didn’t always feel that Casken’s music was adding much to Shakespeare’s wonderful poetry, but (my ultimate test) if I was asked what of this will I remember in 12 months time, it would probably be The Shackled King – so the work clearly made some impact on me!
John's musical journey 