‘Zany’, ‘eccentric’,
‘unhinged’, ‘downright bizarre’ – these are just a handful
of critical responses regarding the music of Gerald Barry,
and all of them could apply to the present release. That’s
not to say there isn’t something to enjoy here, though a quick
web search revealed one regular opera reviewer who openly
admitted he had walked out of this opera on its first run
and, likewise, simply couldn’t sit through the CDs.
I think it’s more
a case of getting into the right mindset when sitting down
with a work such as The Intelligence Park. Barry demands
a great deal from his listener and some will not consider
it worth the effort. The musical language is every bit as
extreme as his recent, more successful operatic venture The
Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, but seen - or heard -
as a piece of surreal music theatre, it has its moments.
The story and
libretto are perhaps the first stumbling block. The most that
Barry will give away about it is this: ‘I do not like texts
which are literal and bound by logic or plot. Qualities which
attract me are coolness and a bizarre artificiality which
allow extreme careering at tangents. Vincent Deane’s libretto
for The Intelligence Park welcomed subversion and had
no interest in being gratefully set. As to what it is about
I have no fixed ideas’ (Contemporary Music Review, 1999, Vol.9)
So the composer
is playing tricks with us again, refusing - as he usually
does - to offer ‘explanations’ or meaning. Adrian Jack’s booklet
note attempts to help us a little, though he seems as foxed
as anyone. We are told that The Intelligence Park is
the Garden of Reason and that the subject is partly the old
favourite of Baroque opera, the conflict between head and
heart, duty and inclination. The central character, the composer
Paradies, plans an old-fashioned ‘opera seria’ on this very
topic, mainly because he falls in love with a castrato who
elopes with the scatty fiancée Paradies needs to secure an
income.
I agree with Jack
that the ‘entire opera is best taken as a sequence of set
numbers, some of which are based on the same music – in fact,
drama as music’. The musical language employed by Barry is
quite extreme, for both singers and players. This generally
takes the form of exceptionally angular, wide-ranging melodic
lines as well as dense, dissonant harmonic textures. Electronic
trickery is kept to a minimum, the only example being some
taped vocals. It must be said that humour, often of a very
dark kind, also pervades the score. Some of this is actually
due to those wide intervals already mentioned – when you hear
the singers growling in a low register followed by a squeaking
falsetto, it brings what is surely an intentional smile to
the face. The band also conjures up sounds that verge on circus-like
burlesque and then follow it with music of real depth and
beauty. The whole work is littered with extreme juxtapositions
like this and it demands a great deal from the listener, so
be warned. All credit must go to the musicians here, who carry
out Barry’s extraordinary demands with dedication and virtuosity
and make the best possible case for the opera.
Whether you consider
it worth the effort getting to know a modernist opera like
this is, I suppose, down to your views on contemporary music
generally. Barry isn’t an easy proposition and this work particularly
is quite long and complex. The booklet does try to help and
there is a full libretto to make of what you will. One thing
we should be grateful for is that NMC give us the chance,
at medium price and in superb sound, to make up our own minds.
Tony Haywood
Robert Paradies
– Richard Jackson (bass-bar)
