Weir: A Night At The Chinese Opera

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Free Music Notes for Weir: A Night At The Chinese Opera

Free Music Review: a late twentieth century operatic jewel
Hit: 5 Stars

The music has been described as minimalist or post-modern, but its great strength is its clarity and simplicity, that enables the multi-layered events to register clearly. The vocal writing is very assured and individual, with some very catchy folk-like melodic lines, and the word-setting is exemplary - almost every word is audible. The orchestral writing for small orchestra is very striking, lots of memorable primary colours, fabulous woodwind riffs and a very original use of tonality - occasional shades of Messiaen, Britten, Gilbert and Sullivan, Sondheim and Ligeti flit through, but the brew is incredibly original and distinctive. The outer acts contain the musical meat, the 2nd being mainly a play with instrumental accompaniment, with fun parodies of Chinese Opera. Much of the opera is light-hearted and witty, but the subjects it raises, progress versus ecology, the nature of tyranny, the power of theatre under absolutist regimes are essential to any age, and the mixture is at once entertaining and disturbing. Certainly its theatrical assurance runs rings around most other perhaps more prominently lauded recent contemporary operas, and it occupies a middle ground between the inaccessible post avant-garde music theatre cocktail favoured perhaps in Europe, and the podgier sort of secondhand neo-romantic brew that seems to be in vogue in the US at the moment.

The performance is fine, the mixture of singers and singer-actors cope well with the whirlwind demands, and the characterization is acute. Orchestrally all goes well too, the odd slip notwithstanding. Recording is very clear with some evidence of audience noise (yes, peals of laughter in a contemporary opera - imagine that!!).

Check this out, it deserves to be heard.

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