Golem was
Barnsley-born John Casken’s first opera. It was commissioned
by the Almeida International Festival of Contemporary music
in London, where it received its world premiere in 1989, directed
by Pierre Audi, who also had a hand in the libretto. Subsequently
it won the first Britten Award for Composition, resulting in
this recording, first issued on Virgin Classics, and a number
of further productions. It was certainly one of the key works
that put Casken on the international map, and I vividly remember
the interest aroused when the Almeida staging came to the 1989
Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, a sell-out audience
cheering long and loud.
The composer has
told me that he was disappointed when the Virgin set, which
he had helped supervise, was withdrawn because of poor sales.
It was hardly going to be a best-seller, but many contemporary
composers rely on recordings to reach a wider public, and Virgin
showed little faith by deleting it so early on. It is thus cause
for celebration that NMC, such a supporter of British new music,
should step in with a handsome re-packaging at mid-price. One
can only hope that the piece gains a whole new audience, for
the opera is well worth investigating.
At its heart this
is a fairly simple narrative, but the underlying themes are
deep and multi-layered. The Golem, a man of clay, is created
by Maharal, the rabbi and spiritual leader of the community.
The Golem is meant to protect the people – ‘Our shield and joy,
A saint to do God’s work in secret’ – but eventually becomes
a threat to that very same community, who eventually seek his
destruction. Casken himself sees many metaphors in this story
of creation, not least that of artistic creation. We also get
allusions to the Faust legend, to man’s eternal dream to have
power over God and, more tellingly for our time, the dangers
of xenophobia and putting too much faith in technology. As Casken
himself says, ‘…the story of the Golem reminds us of our tendency
to create artificial totems in order to make our feelings of
outrage more tolerable, and it warns against assuming that the
solutions to man’s problems rest not within man himself, but
can be found in spite of man’.
The musical language
employed to deliver this allegory is itself many-layered and
rich. A fairly small chamber orchestra is augmented by a large
and diverse array percussion (directed to be played by one person),
including such exotica as clay pots, spring coils, chains and
bell tree. There is also an electronic tape, something Casken
rarely uses and which, he assures me, is purely for special
effect rather than as part of the orchestra. The score is richly
lyrical, in a craggy, post-2nd Viennese sort of way,
and it’s no surprise when Casken mentions Berg, Tippett and
Britten as composers he admires. The harmonic textures are quite
dense at times, but superior orchestration leavens this out,
and the angular nature of much of the melody shows an ancestry
in Romanticism. The passages of ‘aleatoric counterpoint’ that
allow the performers some licence are part of Casken’s inheritance
to his mentor Lutosławski, but one always feels the creative
hand in control.
The performances
are uniformly excellent, as one might expect with the original
team of singers and players. Adrian Clarke’s Maharal is suitably
dominant in both voice and stature, but we glimpse his vulnerability
when the forces of nature get out of hand. John Hall’s Golem
is a complex study of innocence corrupted, of trying to make
sense of human behaviour in a complex world. Patricia Rozario
copes with all that is asked of her with her usual authority,
and Ometh, the ‘figure of hope and conscience,’ a Britten-like
creation for countertenor, is beautifully sung and acted by
Christopher Robinson. All the players respond to Richard Bernas’
vigorous direction with nothing short of virtuosity.
The re-packaging
is less elaborate than the original Virgin but makes better
sense. Instead of two separate booklets (one containing the
libretto) everything has been condensed into one by dumping
the foreign language translations. The two essays by Casken
and Andrew Clements have new copyright dates of 2005, but though
the composer’s has been revised and updated, Clements’ appears
to be entirely the original, save for one reference to Casken’s
last opera, God’s Liar.
The recording was
always excellent, and though no mention is made of re-mastering,
the sound appears to have a touch more depth and clarity. At
mid-price, this really deserves success, and no-one interested
in British opera should miss it.
Tony Haywood
Maharal – Adrian
Clarke (baritone)
