Director, Simon Stone; Set Designer, Chloe Lamford; Costume Designer, Mel Page; Lighting Designer, James Farncombe; Choreographer, Arco Renz. Conductor, Susanna Malkki. Cast – The Waitress (Tereza), Jenny Carlstedt; The Mother-In-Law (Patricia), Sandrine Piau; The Father-In-Law (Henrik), Christopher Purves; The Bride (Stela), Lilian Farahani; The Bridegroom (Tuomas), Markus Nykanen; The Priest, Timo Riihonen; The Teacher (Cecilia), Lucy Shelton
There’s been a lot of hullabaloo about this work – Simon Rattle’s comment that it’s a 21st century Wozzeck, for instance. Apart from the one piece mentioned below, I haven’t, I’m afraid to say, heard a note of Kaija Saariaho’s music before. I prepared myself for this dress rehearsal of the first London performance of ‘Innocence’ by looking at the video of the first performance in Aix on YouTube from 2021 with the LSO.
I didn’t have time to watch the whole performance on video so I dipped in and out. I wasn’t overly impressed – dense slow-moving music, lots of sprechstimme – it sounded like it was going to be a long hour and three quarters in the theatre. I wondered whether it was nearer to a play with music than an opera. It seemed very different from the only other piece of Saariaho I’ve heard – the prelude to L’Amour de loin, influenced (according to the young Italian composer giving a talk I went to recently) by Wagner and an interest in spiritual matters. ‘Innocence’ seems very different – though maybe there is some thinking in this work about how easy it is to be complicit with evil – Innocence therefore being an ironic title……..
Actually watching and listening to the work in the theatre was rather a different experience. The story concerns a school shooting at an international school in which 10 students die. Because the shooter is under the age of criminal responsibility he has a fairly lenient sentence and, 10 years on, is about to leave prison. His brother and parents have essentially in different ways blocked the shooter out of their lives, and Tuomas, his brother, meanwhile has found in Romania a girl (Stela) he wants to marry. However he tells her nothing about his family’s background. The opera begins at his wedding reception. At the last moment because of illness a late replacement is made of a waitress for the wedding, who is the mother of one of the 10 dead students. The opera is essentially about the relationships between the waitress, the bride, the brother and his family and reactions to the shooting. Interspersed with the depicting of these relationships are comments and tales from the students about the shooting and its aftermath, some of whom are clearly dead victims and possibly others who are survivors (it wasn’t always clear). By the end the bride has found out about her husband’s family, the waitress has been unable to find any sort of reconciliation or conclusion from her encounters with the shooter’s family, and the brother reveals to his parents that he was complicit in his brother, the shooter’s, killings.
The set is as in the video and consists of a two- layered four-quartered set, thus depicting up to 8 different scenes as it revolved. This is used very effectively to shift the scene from e.g. wedding reception to kitchen to flashbacks of the shooting at the school.
So how does this work as an opera? Several points:
– I was totally gripped by the piece for its duration in the theatre. So it is certainly an extraordinarily absorbing work, whatever its label.
– The different characters are well drawn and differentiated
– it has few of the lyrical moments one might expect from an opera and it is true that the sound world is relatively constricted – dark strings, brass, drums and keyboards. It also proceeds at what sounds like the same rather funereal basic tempo throughout. And the students by and large and a teacher (dead?) use sprech stimme
– But it does have some lyrical moments – Stela’s singing of her betrayal by her new husband, and Tuomas’ singing of his complicity in his brother’s shooting. In many ways, the lyrical element is carried by the extensive and often moving choral writing, which was outstandingly performed by the ROHCG chorus – sometimes commenting on the action, sometimes part of it. The other absorbingly and definitely operatic element was the role of the waitress’ dead daughter, who was a music student, and who sings, miked, in what I assume is a Finnish folk idiom – I guess a kind of yodelling, herding song in essence, and apparently specific to Saariaho’s home region – with a resonant ghostly echo. It’s in fact this daughter who provides the ending for the opera telling her mother not to remember so much so often – the dead, like the living, need space.
When I think of the complex levels of this piece, the mixing of living and dead, the mundane and mysterious, and the very specific atmosphere the music provides it is very difficult to see how this would work simply offered as a spoken word play. The music is integral to the impact of the piece. Some have described the work as ‘cold’ and I think there is some truth in that, and that the music could have offered more healing, more emotional release – but, again, this piece is resolutely bleak by intention and determined to avoid sentimentality at all costs
One oddity is the use of a number of different languages in the libretto. In one way this makes sense given that the focus is on what happened at an international school. I am not sure it serves any other dramatic purpose, though.
One thing that was unclear to me was whether the shooter brother actually appeared ‘live’ after the completion of his prison term – I think not, but wasn’t sure.
All the singers were uniformly excellent, Sandrine Piau, a Baroque specialist, I think, was the excellent Mother of the shooter and Christopher Purves his father. The Waitress (Tereza), Jenny Carlstedt, the Bride (Stela), Lilian Farahani; the Bridegroom (Tuomas), Markus Nykanen were all first rate. Susanna Malkki seemed to have a total grip of the orchestra, conducting the clearest 4/4 I think I have ever seen from a conductor.
I am so pleased I went to this
John's musical journey 