The Nightingale's to Blame (1998)

"This remarkable production was complemented by the slow and subtle, but rich coloured and smooth-flowing music. The conductor Peter Rundel animated the orchestra achieving subtle changes between lyrical and harsh atmospheres. This co-production between the Wiener Taschenoper and the Musikuniversität is highly recommended."

It is essentially a chamber opera, written for six singers and an ensemble of 17 players – no violins. From these modest resources Holt conjures up an extraordinarily vivid and at times quite magical range of sounds. There is a marvellous nocturnal chorus for offstage women’s voices, accompanied by a muted trumpeter wandering in the auditorium. In a witty, sinister interlude, two strange asexual spirits, the Duendes, give a wry commentary on the misplaced marriage. … If you are interested in opera as a live art form, and not just as a museum of the past, you won’t want to miss it.

Just as Lorca’s aphoristic play lives by parody – of character, of honour, of love – so Holt’s score seems to be parodying almost every convention of Modernist musical language, even opera itself. And extreme leaps and wild melismas of the vocal writing, close tuned to the pungent palette of the 17 instrumentalists, also seems to me a canny recreation in sound of Lorca’s verbal fusion of the lyrical and the grotesque.

It’s that rare thing, a contemporary comic opera that actually works. Like all good comedies it is actually serious, though Holt’s deft touch with words and music brings plenty of laughs. He makes the most of obsessions and peccadilloes of his characters through musical lines which are rich and strongly contoured and which bring the cast to living, breathing reality. His music uses fierce dissonance and delicate sensuousness with equal abandon.

Holt has not thrown his chances away. Every note of this piece sounds purposeful: there is no excess fat on this score, no empty note spinning. There are episodes of austere instrumental beauty: the muted trumpet that plays in the final scene, for instance, evoking all the perfumes of an Andalusian summer’s night. A chamber orchestra notable for an inventive percussion section and the absence of violins, is used with clarity and elegance.

Highly crafted and compact as this 40-year-old British composer’s work always is, it employs a 15-strong ensemble – here from Opera North’s orchestra, conducted by Nicholas Kok – in which low strings (no violins), bass clarinet and alto flute dominate. Brightness, variously delicate romantic or screeching, derives from harp, bells, gongs and piccolos.
Intermittently, a crack of whips brings the score to attention, underlining the words and giving force, especially in the fantastical scene for two duende – catlike, cartwheeling spirits of the night. … This sensuous, subtle range of colours never smothers the six singers. Almost every word of David Johnston’s poetic translation was audible. … With a lightness of touch Holt strongly and wittily identified the characters through their vocal lines. The Don’s lugubrious, ponderous lines extended over several bars, on occasion turning into a yawn. Belisa is full of melismatic titivation while the simpering but sly maid simpers, stutters and bosses.

The Bolton-born composer Simon Holt has, in his own phrase, “been absorbing Lorca for 14 years” and had already produced a whole string of works inspired by the poet’s words when he embarked upon his Lorca-based opera, The Nightingale’s to blame, three years back.
So what is it about the Spanish bard that attracts him? “He just fires my imagination. His poetry makes more of an impact on my nervous system than any other poet I’ve ever read. In fact, I have got to the stage now where I don’t dare take a book of Lorca’s poems off the shelf, because immediate reaction of reading any of them is a compulsion to set it to music.