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Available From: Wednesday, June 15, 2005 |
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Bennett: The Mines of Sulphur
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Sir Richard Rodney Bennett’s Gothic opera The Mines of Sulphur is reminiscent of suspense thrillers from Edgar Allan Poe to Alfred Hitchcock. Love, longing, and dark as well as light comedy abound in this macabre tale of greed and retribution set in a haunted manor house in the West of England. The title of the tale, taken from Shakespeare’s Othello, refers to the theme of gradual corruption. The production from which this recording was taken was a smash hit at Glimmerglass Opera last summer, as can be seen from the reviews below.
This is the work’s premiere recording.
The Mines of Sulphur will be performed by New York City Opera in autumn 2005, on the 40th anniversary of its first staging.
This recording was broadcast on Radio 3 in November 2004 and is due for another broadcast in the summer of this year.
Sir Richard Rodney Bennett is one of Britain’s most prolific composers, whose best-known works include the film scores for Four Weddings and a Funeral and Murder on the Orient Express.
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The gypsy Rosalind has tried to escape from the abusive landowner, Braxton, but is driven back to the isolated house by the winter weather. Her companions – Boconnion, an army deserter, and the tramp Tovey – stealthily enter the house intent on stealing Braxton’s jewels and other valuable possessions. Boconnion murders Braxton and while the three try on their newly acquired finery, there is the sound of a distant horn followed by a knock on the door. Sherrin, the leader of a troupe of travelling actors, enters seeking shelter for the group. Boconnion agrees to this request in exchange for the performance of a play. Sherrin chooses The Mines of Sulphur, a comedy about a wealthy antiquarian who selects a young wife as ‘the loveliest thing in [his] collection’. In the play, the young Haidee and the valet, Hugo, have an illicit affair, and upon discovery are about to kill the older husband. At this point the similarities between the play and reality are too much for Rosalind and Tovey and they stop the performance. One of the actors indicates that he knows Boconnion’s real identity and what has happened in the house. Bocconion draws a bayonet and moves threateningly towards the actors, intending to imprison them in the house and burn it down, in order to destroy all evidence of his crime. However, the actors escape leaving behind Jenny. Boconnion taunts Rosalind by kissing Jenny, who then explains that she has the plague. Rosalind, Boconnion and Tovey are left with the realisation that in fact they are the ones for whom there is no escape, and they pray in vain for mercy.
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Reviews
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'This performance by a respectable company under Stewart Robertson suggest that it’s time some UK company mounted a Bennett revival.'
The Observer
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'Certainly the Mines doesn’t deserve the neglect it has suffered for more than a quarter of a century: this performance shows it can work on stage, and pack a real dramatic punch.'
The Guardian
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'The American cast performs the opera with flair and conviction (and superb diction)…Stewart Robertson conducts a taut interpretation and the orchestra performs the Nocturne interludes with poetic evocation. First rate recording.'
Sunday Telegraph
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'The work comes across strongly on disc: Richard Rodney Bennett’s style may be rooted in the serialism of the 1960s, but his sounds make for gripping music theatre and are for more interesting that the latter-day Puccini churned out by so many of his successors.'
BBC Music Magazine
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'Stewart Robertson and his orchestra convey all the atmosphere of this sometimes Gothic thriller about murderous goings-on in a run-down West Country manor house. The cast is uniformly fine, but Brandon Jovanovich’s Boconnion and Dorothy Byrne’s Leda/Mrs Traxel deserve special mention.'
The Telegraph
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'As to the performance, it’s surely enough to note that the composer regarded both staging and performance a unsurpassable. As sound, performance, and a handsomely documented set, this is an outstanding issue.'
Opera Now
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'All credit then to Glimmerglass Opera for reviving the work in 2004. Stewart Robertson, Music Director at the upstate New York festival, conducts with complete authority and his orchestra reward him with a fine account of the score that walks an elegant tightrope between late Serialism and unabashed lyricism.'
International Record Review
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'…everyone is well cast and directed – as Bennett’s own tribute indicates – in this astonishly assured first full-length opera which belongs in the repertoire.'
Gramophone
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'This new ‘Rose Lake’ from Chandos seems to catch the work’s poetry even more clearly, and to make even more of a single majestic arch out of its mosaic of 12 sections, than does Colin Davis’s world premiere account. This is partly due to Richard Hickox’s firm and sympathetic direction, but also to the excellence of Chandos’s SACD recording, which provides superior delineation of Tippett’s complex textures, not least the passages of cloudy polyphony in the bass registers. The same virtues apply to the ‘Ritual Dances’, which receives an account of unusual vibrancy, culminating for once in its abandon, the BBC NOW here showing themselves a truly virtuoso band.'
BBC Music Magazine
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'Clarity of sound is always needed in Tippett, and this Super Audio CD from Chandos gives us a depth, range and detail that make his last orchestral piece ‘The Rose Lake’ glitter and beguile as never before. The changing colours of a Senegal lake gave Tippett the inspiration; though stuck in Swansea, Hickox and the BBC National Orchestra of Wales transport us, with bells, xylophone, and roto-toms cascading trhough music rich in echoes of the composer’s past.'
The Times ‘The Knowledge’
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