Paul Driver
Riders to the Sea, like Synge's play of the same name, which it sets with little alteration, (1925-32) is as death-haunted as an artwork can be: the depiction of harsh existence on the Aran Islands, where the old woman Maurya, who has lost her husband, his father and four of her six sons to the ocean, now loses two more. In the English National Opera's first production of Vaughan Williams's one-acter, barely more than 40 minutes, we are taken to the cruel heart of her world, in which if the worst has not already happened, it will do so at any moment. Her two daughters conceal from her salvaged clothing suspected to be that of their brother Michael, while their brother Bartley (Leigh Melrose) insists on riding with a grey pony to the sea (to get to a horse fair) despite the weather and his mother's lamentations. She withholds her blessing but is urged to follow him and bestow it, and as a result has a terrifying vision of the dead Michael riding behind his brother, himself shortly to be knocked into the sea by the pony.
When a villager announces this fact, one almost chortles. To lose not four, not five, but six sons to the sea looks like carelessness. But the power of Synge's hard, dramatic scrutiny and Vaughan Williams's amazingly spare and rigorous score pull the scoffer back from the precipice of bathos. It is true there's not much humour in the piece, and the sense we get of people utterly habituated to tragic loss makes it harder to empathise with them, but there is a real intensity to this little opera, and of a kind rarely found in Vaughan Williams.
The play dates from 1904, but the opera was not begun till 1925, so it is likely the dead men are a metaphor for the carnage of the first world war, which Vaughan Williams witnessed and which he expressed in contrasting ways in the eerily tranquillised Pastoral Symphony, pre-dating the opera, and the splenetic Symphony No 4 from soon afterwards. The opera was written without a performance in view, and expressive urgency is felt in every bar.
For those who think of Vaughan Williams as an engaging folklorist, his writing here will shock. He draws near to European modernism, surmising the edges of tonality, using the minimum of material to track the words and lift them into ardent lyric declamation, while adding nothing extraneous. In his fidelity to an extant play, in the fluidity of the musical continuity, in the way he invests a static drama with tension, Vaughan Williams emulates Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande, while also suggesting the social realism of verismo, and seeming to point ahead to the sea-lashed masterpiece that is Britten's Peter Grimes.
Orchestral phrases flare up every so often with a violence not usually associated with Vaughan Williams, the fourth symphony apart. Modal serenity (though not folksong) nonetheless has its place here: notably towards the end, when Maurya, at the point where there is nobody left to lose to the sea (she doesn't count her daughters), achieves a stoic calm marvellously communicated by the mezzo Patricia Bardon. She towers over the performance, but ENO debutantes Kate Valentine and Claire Booth, as those daughters, give brilliant portrayals, too, lovingly detailed, even if the director, Fiona Shaw, has them forever rushing around.
It is Shaw's operatic debut, and an auspicious one. Using designs by Dorothy Cross and Tom Pye -- a mere outline of a cottage but a magnificently realistic Aran Island cliff-face, with ominously dangling boat-coffins and video imagery that looms like a psychological backdrop -- she grippingly renders and anatomises the island community. But the evening consists of more than this. By way of a prologue, and rounding out the production to what the publicity described as a "60-minute arc spanning the life-cycle", embodying "polarities of creation and destruction", we get a staged performance of Sibelius's tone-poem Luonnotar, a Finnish setting of a creation myth from the Kalevala, followed by an interlude of orchestral music and sea-sounds skilfully devised by John Woolrich.
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