Not priggish at all in my book, Jim: but the sad fact seems to be that the whole concept of anything intellectual is regarded with deep suspicion on nearly every side. Music Theatre (in its loosest definition) is very much the most popular form of stage entertainment nowadays in the UK, going by audience figures, but only if it's devoid of any sort of challenge. You only have to see how many of the successful recent musicals are basically existing well-known songs held together by a new 'story' to verify this. Even the 'cleverer' side of the genre, such as some of the Sondheim works, is hardly viable commercially: AL-W's most adult and to my mind most musically adventurous work, Aspects of Love failed similarly to find audiences.

This is helping to create a growing chasm between what people understand by Musical Theatre and opera: when I first started doing musicals professionally (early 1970s) singers and dancers were virtually separate entities, and singers worked largely without microphones: their vocal technique was related to operatic technique. In the first show I did, there were only three radio mics available between a cast of about twenty. Five years later, in a revival of Kismet with largely operatic voices, we had to fight the management like crazy to remove the microphones from both cast and orchestra - a battle that we won, eventually. The most recent big shows I've done have been universally miked - even when the casts number thirty-plus. Increasingly now, performers are all-rounders, with a level of dance ability much beyond that of even some specialised dancers thirty years ago. But their vocal technique relies on mics, which gives a very different effect, and means that general audiences now find big unamplified vocal production alienating, because they've rarely (if ever) heard it live. The traditional stepping stones of operetta and light opera are no longer an important part of the social scene, either, which means that for most, opera sits at the far side of a chasm they have no desire to cross.

The accent on mass entertainment is now on 'realism' - film and TV have seen to this: opera's historical status as provider of spectacle counts for nothing alongside big movies with computer graphics. It's in something of a lose-lose situation, I'm afraid: whatever opera can do, there are other forms of entertainment that are rather better at offering the public what they think they want....

As Ron has just reminded me, the BBC2 broadcast of this begins in 20 minutes!! 

I'll post more thoughts on it tomorrow, when perhaps I'll feel a bit more eloquent. But for now, I'm having a very hard time finding a fault with this. Absolutely dazzling, and gripping drama in a way that practically nobody but HB can deliver these days. Tomlinson and Rice should be canonised immediately. Too long? No way! As always with HB, it's not about telling a story the end of which is 'unknown' - quite the opposite. The drama comes from the inexorability and relentless closing in of a net which we've always known (almost in our bones) was there from the very beginning.

Agreed - especially about Tomlinson and Rice.  Not having been able to get to any of the performances, I've been looking forward to this for  a while and, if anything, expectations were exceeded - this was utterly visceral, totally gripping music drama.  On reflection, I find it incredible that listeners can find this music "difficult" - although I'm reasonably attuned to Birtwistle and know what to expect; the immediacy and directness are overpowering.

And I didn't find the Keres at all problematic ...

On reflection I do not find it incredible that people find the music difficult: but I do find it depressing that some appear unable or unwilling to make an effort; and surprising that, if they have made that effort, they cannot find something in it.  I suppose I do find it incredible that some might prefer, say, Rossini: but there you are, it takes all kinds, and all (or most!) are entitled to their view.

  A splendid design, Ron, which will be well used in several requests I've had from overseas.

  I thought that last night's broadcast was a red-letter day for Music Theatre.   It is now 50 years since "West Side Story" arrived to suggest the possibilities of integrated theatre and we've seen a few markers in the intervening years.   Covent Garden's production is, for me, another case of ' a terrible beauty' being realised.     Last week's R3 broadcast was a compulsive experience.   The accumulative power of the visual impact on TV, cleverly integrated a mythical world with such deceptive simplicity, along with a rare sense of beauty.

Throughout the past week, dialogue clips have resonated in my mind.

      'After the heat of lust, the heat of anger, the beast must sleep...'

      'The sun that shines here is dark'     'Gorge your craw'

      'I'm mobbed by shadows, I'm lost inside myself'    'My dreams always of loss'

And the first sight of Asterios is now an indelible image.

My only reservation is anger for the cretins who rushed through the final credits.   Otherwise, downright explosively, tensely good.

John W
As a non-professional (unlike so many here) let me respond in layperson's terms.  I do not think they are 'frightened' of anything.  They are seeking to create music theatre in their own language and idiom, as people of our time (and highly trained professional at that) drawing on, but not limited, by older attempts.  I find these attempts to be in good faith, and rarely do I gain nothing from them.  'The Minotaur' was a rich, beautiful and disturbing piece, even if the 'tunes' were intermittent, either in the vocal or orchestral music (though they were there!).  What more could I ask of them?

John: unless forms of artistic expression progress, they stagnate. Every new generation of opera composers has had to build on the past but take the genre somewhere new, in the same way that both stage and screen drama have developed radically over the years.

Interestingly the one area of Music Theatre where this hasn't happened - the musical - has become so tied to its past and providing Lowest Common Denominator mass-entertainment that it's almost ground to a halt, so far as new work is concerned. Increasingly, commercial managements are relying on revivals or compilation musicals (existing well-known song used as a peg for a story) to pull the punters in: it's junk theatre, just as much fast food and carbonated sugary drinks are junk nourishment, easy to get mugs hooked onto for a quick-buck profit, but offering nothing little substantial or of lasting value. If you want 'tunes' that you can take away, go there: you probably know them already, before you go, but there'll be precious little that makes you think or alters your view of the experience of life the tiniest jot.

To get the most out of opera, it's worth remembering that it's really a participatory rather than purely a spectator event, that what you get out of it is proportional to the work you put in, and that the vanguard of the movement will always require the most cooperation on early encounters. There will always be detractors who are only too willing to shoot a new piece down because they think it's in some way clever to broadcast the fact that they don't want to understand it. Your reaction is pretty much the same as could be heard concerning Britten's operas in the fifties and sixties, and still occasionally even today. When you've constantly proved vociferous about your resistance to newer music, then it's really not that surprising: it's obviously going to be an unrealistically huge leap for you to make. It's a classic case of wood and trees, though, isn't it? You want 'tunes' so you can have something memorable to go home with, but it's quite obvious from the majority of posts here that those who embraced the whole piece found the entire experience - not just the surface, but the many layers that lie beneath - made a huge and lasting impression upon them, and that with succeeding encounters the experience will become yet deeper and more rounded.