United Kingdom Garsington Opera 2024 [5] – Andrew Norman, A Trip to the Moon: Soloists, Garsington Opera Adult and Youth Companies, Primary and Infant School Companies, and Philharmonia Orchestra / Douglas Boyd (conductor). Garsington Opera at Wormsley, 30.7.2024. (CR)
Cast:
Eoa – Jennifer France
Georges Méliès – Robert Murray
Queen of the Moon People – Sarah-Jane Lewis
Oeo – Patrick Dow
Alcofrisbas – Merryn Campbell Chandra
Micromegas – Beau Dunsford
Omega – Harry Gupta
Barbenfouilis – Kelis Markwell
Parafaragaramus – Maisie Marshall
Nostradamus – Tavia Ndudzo
Production:
Director – Karen Gillingham
Designer – Rhiannon Newman Brown
Lighting designer – Ben Pickersgill
Video designer – Claudia Lee
Choreographer – Natasha Khamjani
Andrew Norman’s one act melodrama A Trip to the Moon was commissioned by Sir Simon Rattle and the Berlin Philharmonic, and premiered in 2017. It also received a staged performance at the Barbican by the London Symphony Orchestra with the same conductor. Hamburg State Opera commissioned a revised chamber version in 2023, and it is that version (albeit retaining Norman’s original English text, rather than the new German translation) which presumably was given here by Garsington Opera. With pairs of first and second violins, violas, cellos, and trumpets, one double bass, trombone, bass trombone, two percussionists, and one performer at the piano and celeste, and the fact that it is primarily (but not exclusively) intended for children, it is rather akin to a modern version of a Britten chamber opera, all the more appropriate at Garsington’s festival this year which featured one of those, A Midsummer Night’s Dream (review here).
Billed here as ‘an opera for people of all ages’, which aptly described the supportive audience of the performers’ family and friends, this production also enlisted the efforts of people of just about all ages – from infants of about three or four up to young teenagers, and adults from their 20s to seniors – allowing the festival’s adult and youth companies to play a part in the 180-strong chorus, as well as local schools. They are also among the first beneficiaries of Garsington’s new studios in the grounds of their home at the Wormsley Estate for practising and social programmes.
A Trip to the Moon is inspired by Georges Méliès’s celebrated motion picture of 1902 but isn’t simply an operatic adaptation of it. Méliès, carrying his video camera throughout, becomes one of the central characters, gazing at the Moon through his telescope at the beginning, and is assisted by six young enthused but callow astronomers who build a rocket to transport them to the earth’s satellite. There they encounter the Moon People, who speak a language composed entirely of vowels, and each side has to learn to overcome barriers in communication and social protocol. Like the tantalising knowledge of good and evil in the Garden of Eden, the potential for trouble emerges when Georges confirms to Eoa that there is also such a thing as ‘Uai’ on Earth, which seems to equate with something like war or strife. When a Moon child goes missing, the Moon People turn upon the seven visitors from Earth in confrontational suspicion. But the child is found (an oblique reference to the Old Testament story of Athalia and the restoration of Israel upon the discovery of the rightful Israelite king Joas in the Temple?) and relations are restored before Georges and his assistants return to Earth. The drama comes full orbit, as Eoa is seen looking back to Earth through her telescope, just as Georges contemplated the Moon at the beginning.
In this musical drama about reaching out and overcoming difference and strangeness, it is clearly a deliberate and effective strategy that Georges and his astronomers speak their parts (although the frequent assonance of Norman’s text gives their lines some rhythmic impetus) and the first sung vocal lines we hear are Jennifer France’s liquid vowel ululations when Eoa meets Georges. Robert Murray imitates those in a clear high tenor voice, lean and without vibrato, and musical and social harmony starts to be established (Georges is the only one of the named Earthlings in the cast who sings at all during the performance). Patrick Dow – as Oeo, Eoa’s male Moon counterpart – enunciates his part in more detached, syllabic vocalisations, more assertive than France’s melismas, and pre-empting the more menacing staccato grunts he makes to whip up the Moon dwellers when they gather angrily to confront the Earth visitors. As the Queen of the Moon People, Sarah-Jane Lewis tends to incant over the more dynamic dialogues between Eoa, Oeo, and Georges with a less unworldly, ripe-toned coloratura floating over them. Highly engaged, resounding contributions from the various groups constituting the choir here add to the joyously clamorous harmony, though they first gather with something like the buzzing of bees, along with the percussive sequences articulated by the Moon People with the tubes they wield, tapped out or occasionally whirled around at different pitches.
Norman’s score is largely minimalist in character, tending to provide a thrusting atmospheric backdrop to the drama rather than direct comment or engagement with the action, and therefore not differentiating much between any music that might be associated with the Earth people on the one hand, and those of the Moon on the other. The choral episodes for the latter often oscillate around chords of the major 7th, bright and diatonically grounded, but by just falling short of a completely consonant triad, there is a tone of uncertainty and open-endedness, even a tinge of melancholy. Douglas Boyd and the performers from the Philharmonic Orchestra astutely keep the whole thing on track, providing rhythmic focus for the sprawling choral sequences, and clear points of timbral interest elsewhere, especially in the long prelude: to go back to the Britten, just as he takes us sonically from the everyday world into the woods for the fantasy of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, so Norman conjures a sequence of sounds which helps transports us into the cosmic realm, even if the rest of the score remains somewhat cheerfully sublunary. Nevertheless, Garsington’s presentation of the spectacle, with the drama’s intriguing concept, will have children and adults delight in the magic of live theatrical performance.
Curtis Rogers