Composers: Claudio Monteverdi, Leoš Janáček and Libby Larsen
Director: Tobias Millard
One of the perpetual pleasures of Arcola’s annual Grimeborn opera festival is exposure to pieces that one may not otherwise experience. That’s particularly true for Green Opera’s Testament, which takes several short works from across the centuries and combines them into a single 80-minute experience.
Monteverdi’s Il combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda tells the story of a couple who find themselves on opposite sides of a battle during the First Crusade. Shafali Jalota’s Clorinda, a Saracen, heads into battle, but her armour hides her identity such that her lover, the knight Tancredi (mezzo-soprano Emily Hodkinson) engages her in a sword fight without recognising her.
Shaloti and Hodkinson’s initial, pre-battle flirtations are grand enough to withstand the sustained periods in which their battle is narrated by Breton Spiteri’s Testo. As Spiteri narrates the battle, director Tobias Millard has the two combatants play out the battle separately in slow motion on two separate raised platforms. As a visual aesthetic, it works, but to the detriment of the emotional connection with the characters.
The middle portion of the repertoire focuses on Libby Larsen’s 2000 work Try Me, Good King, presenting the wives of Henry VIII through the words of their last letters. This is no Marlow and Moss pop musical reinterpretation: everything is tinged with sadness and regret at the way their lives as women prevented the autonomy granted to the king and the other male members of his retinue. Some similarities to Six obviously persist: both pieces give their most romantic beats to Henry’s third wife Jane Seymour, and of the women is fully distinct, thanks to impassioned and insightful renditions by Katherine McIndoe.
It is a curious, if particularly intentional, move for Larsen to immortalise only the first five of Henry’s six wives, though. While Katherine Parr’s story was very different from her predecessors’, the omission feels like it makes the other women’s story unfinished. While four of them died before Henry (divorcée Anne of Cleves being the exception), it feels as if Larsen’s work needs a firmer conclusion.
At least here, it progresses into a further work to lessen the curiousness of Try Me, Good King’s ending. Leoš Janáček’s The Diary of One Who Disappeared is a pastoral song cycle inspired by a series of poems supposedly written by a Moravian farmer. The poems were later discovered to be hoaxes, but the ardour of young framer Jan’s obsession with the Romani girl Zefka captured the composer’s imagination.
There are hints of farmer Jan’s obsessive behaviour in Spiteri’s performance, although at times it spills over into obstinacy and apparent resentment towards the natural world. McIndoe’s Zefka, calmer and more at ease with nature, is a mollifying influence, providing a gentle counterpoint.
Still, the Janáček feels like both the most dominant and weakest part of the evening’s repertoire. While Green Opera’s staging allows each section to segue into the next with grace and precision, and while Testament shines a light on under-appreciated works, it is the earlier pieces that provide the strongest impression.
Continues until 19 July 2025
