Newspaper Article

An ambitious take on Sophocles

White, Michael

2014

Overview

This chorus is the Greek type, working by the rules of ancient drama as a single voice, sometimes participating in the action, sometimes detachedly observing, never quite acting as the milling crowd of a conventional grand opera. But it's also Greek in that \"Thebans\" is an operatic adaptation of the Oedipus myth. Its (English) libretto is adapted from the three \"Theban\" plays by Sophocles that tell how Oedipus discovers that he has unwittingly murdered his father and married his mother, how this terrible self-knowledge hounds him to his grave and how it then affects his child Antigone, resulting in her death as well. Then, you could make that complaint of Wagner's \"Tristan.\" And Wagner comes repeatedly to mind here. Mr. [Julian Anderson] doesn't acknowledge him as influential, and he clearly isn't in terms of the sound world of this opera -- a work that has a peculiarly English intelligence, achieving massive gestures by minutely crafted means, and referencing, if anything, the glamorous but lucid grandeur Michael Tippett could deliver on a good day. Onstage, the soloists did well too, given a fluid, arioso style of vocal writing that limited their opportunities to shine but did encourage them to be real characters. Susan Bickley's desperate Jocasta, Peter Hoare's conniving Creon and Matthew Best's creepily androgynous Tiresias set benchmarks, with Julia Sporsen's Antigone and Roland Wood's Oedipus not quite as fleshed out as they should have been, but still credible.

• Publisher: New York Times Company
• Subject: Anderson, Julian