James MacMillan’s Clemency

The Guardian, Tim Ashley
Sunday 8 May 2011

Clemency – review
Linbury Studio, London

Clemency, James MacMillan’s new opera for five singers and string orchestra, is about “vengeance and mercy”, according to its librettist, Michael Symmons Roberts. A co-production between ROH2 and Scottish Opera, it’s a religious work that examines the inscrutable nature of divine justice by recasting part of the book of Genesis in contemporary terms.

Abraham offers hospitality to three mysterious, angelic Triplets, who prophesy that his wife Sarah, who is ageing and childless, will have a son within a year. The Triplets are also bent, however, on the vengeful destruction of the “twin towns” that stand nearby. Abraham is soon pleading with them, in vain, to spare the towns if they can be found to contain five people who are “good in heart and mind”.

There are problems with some of this. The words “twin towns”, with their overtones of twin towers, raise provocative implications of terrorism, though the programme notes tell us that some sort of vigilante action is what is intended. The towns, meanwhile, are a latter-day Sodom and Gomorrah: distancing themselves from a narrative responsible for centuries of homophobia, MacMillan and Symmons Roberts reimagine them as the centre of a dictatorship predicated on torture and injustice.

The text is opaque, at times esoteric. Symmons Roberts indulges in overload: “My destiny is played out on its wall of pearl” is a typical line. Parts of it are in what I took to be Hebrew and/or Aramaic, but we’re offered no guidance as to their meaning. The score, however, has some attractive moments, though there’s a bit too much consciously ecstatic string writing in the tradition of Tippett’s Fantasia Concertante on a Theme of Corelli. Sarah has a striking central aria. The Triplets sing in close harmony that broadens into suave polyphony with overtones of Palestrina.

It’s well done. There’s shapely playing from the Britten Sinfonia under Clark Rundell. Janis Kelly registers Sarah’s “gratitude and terror” towards God in a performance of considerable power. Grant Doyle is her bewildered, angry Abraham, while Adam Green, Eamonn Mulhall and Andrew Tortise are curiously seductive as the Triplets.

Katie Mitchell’s modern-dress production contains the action in a framed three-part set that resembles a triptych, and ingeniously offers multiple perspectives on the same series of rooms. There are some clever touches, with the Triplets arriving dressed as workmen, but departing for Sodom in suits, Reservoir Dogs-style. Mitchell wisely plays most of it straight, though: some of it is simply too dense to warrant interpretative interference.

• This article was amended on 9 May 2011. The original referred to Janice Kelly. The name spelling has been corrected.

The Telegraph, Rupert Chritiansen
Clemency, Linbury Studio theatre, review

James MacMillan’s new one-act libretto is subtly haunting and quietly powerful.
Rating: * * * *

Drawn loosely from a story in Genesis and perhaps also inspired by Britten’s church parables, Clemency is a new one-act opera by the Catholic composer James MacMillan, working for the third time with the librettist Michael Symmons Roberts and director Katie Mitchell.

Subtly haunting and quietly powerful, it is a parable of God’s will in the world, its precise significance left opaque.

Abraham and Sarah are presented as a middle-aged childless couple living in honest poverty – as so often in Mitchell’s work, the resonance suggest the Balkans during the wars of the 1990s. Three unknown young men, dressed in military fatigues, appear at their door. Abraham and Sarah show them hospitality, for which they are grateful.

They tell Sarah that, although she is past the age of child-bearing, she will bear a son. Abraham and Sarah are sceptical of the men’s right to speak for God, but the men explain that they have come to wreak divine vengeance on the “twin towns” nearby. Angels or terrorists (or both), they change into dark suits, produce weaponry and prepare to fulfil their mission.
Abraham cannot believe the stories they tell of the wickedness which pervades the towns. He begs for clemency. Find “50 acts of selflessness” among the inhabitants, he says, and relent. The men agree, and Abraham continues to bargain – find 40, 30, 10 and spare them, he implores.

But they will not meet Abraham’s final plea that one good deed will bring salvation. Sarah is left contemplating the birth of a longed-for son, but wonders what sort of world he will inherit. The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away; blessed be the name of the Lord.
The pace is slow but sure, the idiom harmonically intense, the mood bleak, solemn and impassioned, often evoking threnodic Orthodox chant.

Otherwise, there are no fancy effects or percussive extravagances, the sense of spiritual austerity being underpinned by an orchestra of strings alone. The Britten Sinfonia plays with total assurance under Clark Rundell.
Mitchell and her designer Alex Eales set the drama on a stage divided into a gold-framed triptych of three rooms.

Grant Doyle and Janis Kelly as Abraham and Sarah and Eamonn Mulhall, Andrew Tortise and baritone Adam Green as the mysterious visitors make up an ideal cast.
This is an opera which leaves a lasting effect, and I want to hear it again soon.

The Times, T2, Neil Fisher
Opera
Clemency
Linbury Studio, ROH
***

In the strange book of Genesis, it is one of the stranger moments, particularly for its brevity. Abraham’s aged wife Sarah is told by three messengers from God that she will miraculously bear a child. With little time to absorb this wondrous news, the angels also have something less inspiring to say: they are en route to Sodom and Gomorrah and intend to destroy both cities, sparing none of their inhabitants.

It is fertile ground for this, James MacMillan’s third collaboration with the writer Michael Summons Roberts and the director Katie Mitchell. It is also their second work, after the Linbury staging of Parthenogenosis in 2009, to explore biblical questions in a modern context, using the Brittenesque format of chamber opera, or even staged parable.

Clemency certainly provides plenty of dramatic heat. “Think of us as travellers,” sing the angels, here known as the Triplets. “But you look like murderers,” snaps back Grant Doyle’s grizzled Abraham, while Janis Kelly’s wary, weary Sarah gets a knife ready for her unknown guests – just in case- as well as a quickly tossed salad. When the three visitors reveal their murderous plans (Using evidence of atrocities from their cameraphones), they don gangstersuits and snap guns out of their briefcases. Are they really divine or just self-appointed vigilantes?

The question is a subtle one, though MacMillan’s souped-up score and Robert’s sometimes opaque and under-enunciated text takes it into odd territory. His current musical style, familiar to those who both loved and loathed his St John Passion, is to alternate moments of seraphic beauty – in this case the Triplets, who sing in close-harmony unison – with jagged vocal lines, sudden crunchy chords (Clemency is set for strings only, here the excellent Britten Sinfonia under Clark Rundell) and wailing melismas.

It’s a formula that can drive Mitchell’s contemporary setting, beautifully evoked in Alex Eales’s three-panelled set, towards something more contrived. And in 50 packed minutes it feels as if the balance between the scene-setting and action has gone askew. But the performances are hugely committed and the show is thrillingly tight. You certainly won’t be bored.

New Statesman, Alxandra Coghlan
Fleeting visions
10 May 2011

James MacMillan’s latest chamber opera is difficult to pin down.

Our English word “guest” derives from the Greek “xenos”. It’s a word whose historical and etymological tensions are hidden in its interchangeable meanings of guest, host and stranger. It is the friction inherent to this idea of hospitality, of the unstable relationship of power, otherness and duty between host and guest, that animates James MacMillan’s latest chamber opera Clemency.

Following where 2000’s Parthnogenesis led, Clemency is strongly informed by the composer’s Roman Catholic faith, an affiliation shared with Michael Symmons Roberts, librettist for both works. Taking that most inscrutable of Genesis stories, The Hospitality of Abraham (most familiar from Andrei Rublev’s fifteenth-century icon of the same name), as its root, MacMillan cultivates the tale into a contemporary social fable. Complicating the sins of Sodom and Gomorrah through their pointed rechristening as the “twin towns”, Macmillan’s oblique parable stretches beyond morality into the realm of contemporary politics.

Scored for five singers and string orchestra, Clemency’s brisk 50 minutes chart the intrusion of three strangers into the quiet domesticity of the aged Abraham and Sarah. Welcomed and fed, the strangers foretell that when they return in a year Sarah will have had a son, and the couple recognise them as angels. Learning of their plans to destroy neighbouring towns, Abraham pleads with them for mercy, eventually extracting a promise that if just five good men are found the towns will be spared.

Framing the action within a gilt-edged triptych, Alex Eales’ set anchors the opera in the symbolic, two-dimensional world of religious iconography. This flattened perspective (mirrored physically in some clever spatial use of the three panelled stage sections) chafes fruitfully against the detailed naturalism of the sets and Katie Mitchell’s direction, giving weight to their grubby contemporary banality.

While MacMillan is perhaps best-known for his Celtic-inflected choral works, his operatic writing has proved itself altogether tougher and more flexible. After the lyric abrasions of Parthenogenesis it was hard to be satisfied with Clemency’s uneasy mix of pastiche Eastern Orthodoxy (with MacMillan’s signature Lombardic ornaments reinvented as Klezmer-style embellishments) and sub-Vaughan Williams string effects.

The same mewling violin cries that pleaded so eloquently in the opening of The Confession of Isobel Gowdie here lost any emotional referent, and while much of the string writing had a muscular brilliance about it, its coherence was lost in the Babel of harmonic languages. Quite literally out of tune with their earthly surroundings, the music of the Triplets (strongly sung by Adam Green, Eamonn Mulhall, Andrew Tortise) established its own modal sound-world, the three-voices-in-one presenting a striking musical Trinity. Only the occasional unisons were marred by the challenge of blending three such different vocal tones.

Grant Doyle led the cast as Abraham in a beautifully-judged piece of singing that brought authority without bombast to some of MacMillan’s loveliest writing. The delicacy of his performance was matched by Janis Kelly’s life-worn Sarah, whose quiet presence only fully surrendered to song in the rather ambiguous ending.

Having the strings of the Britten Sinfonia (efficiently conducted by Clark Rundell) as orchestra was a piece of luxury casting by no means fully exploited by the deeply sunken pit. Given the Linbury’s almost endlessly flexible setup, perhaps a more prominent position could usefully have been found for them, mirroring the instrumental prominence MacMillan’s music demands and achieving more direct interplay with the singers.

While MacMillan’s orchestral and choral works establish a sound-world on their own terms, giving the composer one of the most recognisable voices of contemporary British music, this has not always been true of his operas. Caught up in the moment-to-moment reflection of the libretto’s images, he can forget to ground the music in a self-sufficient framework or language, leaving it curiously vulnerable and elusive. With Symmons Roberts’ inscrutable text our sole concordance here, MacMillan’s biblical vision failed to make itself understood, barring us from interpretation even as the spread wings of the triptych invited us in.

Linbury Studio Theatre, Royal Opera House, London, until 14 May

The Independent, Jessica Duchen
Clemency, Royal Opera House, London (Rated 5/ 5 )
Wednesday, 11 May 2011

Less is more: in James MacMillan’s music, every note counts. And never more so than in Clemency, the Scottish composer’s brand-new chamber opera, which packs questions powerful, emotional, philosophical and religious into just 45 minutes. With his regular librettist Michael Symmons Roberts and the director Katie Mitchell, MacMillan has created a terrifically intense, focused and inspired musical work on a thought-provoking parable, updated to the present day.

Sarah and Abraham, a dowdy middle-aged couple in a run-down apartment, offer hospitality to three men apparently in need of shelter. But the strangers are angels: they bring a divine message that Sarah, despite her age, will soon bear a son. Then, though, they change into suits, concealing guns. Their mission is to take revenge on two towns that have treated outsiders with cruelty. Abraham argues for clemency. The ethics of “collective punishment” are never far away.

Mitchell’s staging and the excellent designs by Alex Eales present this fable in a tripartite frame that suggests an altarpiece, while remaining naturalistic behind it. First, for several music-less minutes, Sarah cooks, birds sing, planes pass overhead. Abraham, alone at prayer, sings long phrases with quasi-Middle Eastern ornamentation. But the characterisation is unfailing: Sarah, sung by the marvellous Janis Kelly, has soaring, palpitating and plunging lines as her emotions are buffeted by fear and elation. Abraham, the full-toned Grant Doyle, is straightforward, humble but tenacious. The “triplets” are heard first in close harmony, almost as if with one voice at three pitches: an otherworldly sound, performed with frightening power by Adam Green, Eamonn Mulhall and Andrew Tortise.

But there’s another character: the orchestra – the strings of the Britten Sinfonia, conducted by Clark Rundell. They play as if possessed in instrumental episodes that seem to argue the points, amplify the emotions and ratchet up the tension. These passages structure the score just as the three-part picture-frame structures the staging.

The end, though, seemed rather abrupt. In the ensuing long silence, we waited and hoped for a few extra concluding minutes.
To 14 May (020 7304 4000)

The Stage, Edward Bhesania
Clemency
Wednesday 11 May 2011

Playing out within the frames of Alex Eales’s giant hinged triptych, James MacMillan’s latest operatic collaboration with poet Michael Symmons Roberts is a contemporary retelling of the Old Testament story of the hospitality of Abraham and Sarah - a childless elderly couple who take in three angels on their way to unleashing God’s judgement upon the sinful nearby towns of Sodom and Gomorrah.

Though operating entirely as a single entity - whether in burnished close-harmony or flourishing Renaissance-style polyphony - the present-day trio (Andrew Tortise, Eamon Mulhall and Adam Green) creates deep-rooted unease through the uncertainty of its objectives. Are these ‘Triplets’ really archangels carrying out God’s work, or fundamentalists bent on destroying their enemies? The trio’s furtive glances and their ritualistic changing from manual workers’ clothes into suits (concealing gun holsters) before leaving for their ‘mission’ suggests one thing - the atrocities they claim to want to halt in the neighbouring towns suggest another.

The trio’s fervent, penetrating intensity is matched by the string players of the Britten Sinfonia - a highly motivated army of generals under the lucid direction of Clark Rundell.

Amid all the searing drama it’s easy to overlook the figures of Abraham and Sarah. Director Katie Mitchell (who also worked on MacMillan’s recent The Sacrifice for Welsh National Opera) succeeds in beautifully and delicately conveying their mutual respect, while Grant Doyle sings Abraham with a pure, uncomplicated richness one could happily listen to all night and Janis Kelly perceptively reflects the burden of Sarah’s longstanding sterility seemingly as much by what is thought as what is sung. Equally powerful in narrative and in musical terms, this work seems to have hit the ground running.

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