Royal Opera House, Covent Garden (studio)
24 April 2017 (released)
28 April 2017
Research is usually a chore but this time it was a delight to re-watch Luis Buñuel’s 1962 film El Ángel Exterminador in preparation for Thomas Adès and Tom Cairns (composer and librettist/director) opera; The Exterminating Angel. A dark film satirising Spanish high society and the church at the time Franco’s dictatorship, it’s about a post opera dinner party that finds it cannot leave a room. This leads for a series of events, conversations and the erosion of basic humanity, with some surreal and bizarre touches. Sheep and bears anyone?
The opera sticks quite close to the film and is just magnificent. It captures the macabre situation on a vast revolving set dominated by a square arch acting as both barrier and window to the world, and with clever lighting which actually enhances the strange hallucinatory effect of the film. The mood begins before the opera as the audience takes their seats to the sound of bells and with sheep on the stage.
The ensemble cast don’t put a foot wrong in what is a complicated arrangement of acting and singing and it would be wrong to single anyone out for a star turn. They superbly interact building the tension as the reality of their circumstances starts to take hold and the group fragments.
What has been amped up is the latent horror of the film with the music, sets, performers and effects combining to create as an unsettling an atmosphere as I can remember in any auditorium. The disembodied hand – oddly but perfectly accompanied by classical guitar, the phantasmagorical flying figure across the stage and bloody death of the lovers.
Adès’ score is an extraordinary collage of different styles ranging from off-kilter waltzes, Latin American rhythms and requiem. The sudden crash of drums that closes Act I hits you around the head and sent the person sitting next to me into the ceiling. It’s perfectly in synch with the libretto and the actions on the stage, the huge orchestra under Adès nimbly shifting between the styles.
Like the film the opera leaves many questions unanswered, though at one point in the opera we may get a glimpse of the Exterminating Angel! Buñuel couldn’t be bothered to explain it and you get the feeling that Ades and Cairns will be quite happy with that.
At the Royal Opera House 1, 3, 6 and 8 May.
Photo courtesy of Clive Barda and the Royal Opera House.
