Punch and Judy

April 23, 2008

I just returned from a performance of Birtwistle’s Punch and Judy in the Young Vic. It was his first opera composed over forty years ago, before the latter opera’s of Brittain with whom he overlaps. I think that Bertwistle, Maxwell and Adams in different ways are the three greats of modern opera, and comparable with the creativity and originality that characterised the period around the turn of the last century: Verdi and Puccini but not Wagner. No one is in the same league as Wagner, although Bertwistle’s most recent, The Minotaur comes close. One of the very different things about tonight’s performance was that it was in a very small theatre, in the round. Queuing to get in I discovered the composer behind me! Sitting to the side, at times I could have touched the singers. You could see the sweat on their brows and the intensity of the experience was grated for its increased intimacy. The brilliance of the work is the way he takes a common story, Punch and Judy and translates it into a complex series of interactions; the juxtaposition of violence and sex, of brutality and sensitivity to give two examples. Opera for me is a complete experience, and Wagnerian opera transcendent . Everything is there, music, drama, art and the voices of great stars you feel physically, you don’t just hear them. It’s also a living art, for over 200 years now we have had a continuous flow of high quality original material.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Recent Posts

About the Cynefin Company

The Cynefin Company (formerly known as Cognitive Edge) was founded in 2005 by Dave Snowden. We believe in praxis and focus on building methods, tools and capability that apply the wisdom from Complex Adaptive Systems theory and other scientific disciplines in social systems. We are the world leader in developing management approaches (in society, government and industry) that empower organisations to absorb uncertainty, detect weak signals to enable sense-making in complex systems, act on the rich data, create resilience and, ultimately, thrive in a complex world.
ABOUT USSUBSCRIBE TO NEWSLETTER

Cognitive Edge Ltd. & Cognitive Edge Pte. trading as The Cynefin Company and The Cynefin Centre.

© COPYRIGHT 2024

< Prev

The night sleeper

It's been years since I took a sleeper train and then I take two on ...

More posts

Next >

Getting together

An excellent evening - we issued an invitation to network members to join current course ...

More posts

linkedin facebook pinterest youtube rss twitter instagram facebook-blank rss-blank linkedin-blank pinterest youtube twitter instagram