No more: Akhnaten at ENO
Akhnaten
English National Opera
London Coliseum
Balcony B4, £12
23 February 2019
ENO page
I think I have now, at last, finally, made my peace with Philip Glass. For years I have sought out and subjected myself to these god-awful pieces, driven by desperate FOMO. What is it that other people see in these things? What makes them so popular? Why do they get such rave reviews? The conclusion Akhnaten has led me to is that, whatever the answer to those questions, I’m just not going to get it. I am a music snob and this music is not for people like me. Finally I look round at those standing ovators not with envy but with condescension. These people. What do they know?
I actually think Akhnaten is one of the better ones. There is the odd bit of fun orchestration, of punchy percussion. There are at least a handful of minutes in the 2.5 hours of music that have enough rhythmic variation to sound almost not like every second of music Glass has ever written. Even, in the first five minutes, where Glass moves with a harmonic velocity that is white-knuckle compared to anything in Satyagraha (like, at least a chord change every 20 seconds!), I felt a shiver of delight. This, I thought, this might be the one where I get it.
But then the singing started and then the hours passed much as they do in every Glass opera, that is, with mind-gratingly repetitive music, brutal vocal writing, text that when it is not intentionally indecipherable is indecipherable anyway and stage action that I doubt even Glass himself could make heads or tails of. ‘How is this opera’, I raged impotently to myself, before my epiphany of Glass calm. ‘What about drama and character and narrative and all the things that make the operatic voice an unbearable heightener’, on and on I went, ‘what would these people think if they heard a real opera, have they any ideeeeaaaaa’. Indeed.
Phelim McDermott’s production helped. From the hype I expected music-concert levels of spectacle, an overhwhelment of the senses, an apotheosis of visual wonder. What I didn’t expect was juggling. Lots of juggling. I feel guilty, because it further marks me out as a snob, but juggling I find difficult to take seriously. The combination of deadly serious nonsense music and so much juggling became a delight. They juggled balls, they juggled clubs, they juggled upside down, they juggled lying down, they juggled around singers, they juggled over singers. I lost it when they tried to juggle beach balls, and again when they wriggled on like juggling caterpillars. Add in the facts that they were dressed in ill-fitting unitards and one of them kept on fucking up and dropping their balls and I couldn’t keep it together.
Juggling aside there’s not a whole lot to the production, and I struggle to see what could cause a fuss. In my prejudicial opinion it’s nothing to the mind-bending spectacle of the ROH’s Queen of Spades, and was in several ways decidedly un-slick, particularly in the squeaky juddering of the set movement. I shouldn’t be too unkind, and there were moments: the great glowing orb, whatever it meant, and the girls with the single set of hair, whoever they were. But I did get the puerile giggles at some of the nudity, particularly at the end of Act II where with ice-dripping slowness Akhnaten inch by inch rotated his beautiful behind into view, a portentous phasing of the moon to Glass’s music of portentous nothingness. Ludicrous.
If ever this opera could have been saved for me then Anthony Roth Costanzo in the title role would have done it: totally committed and impassioned, he put to shame everyone and everything around him. But, still, he over-sang and I had no idea what any of his words were, or if they even were words. With the ghastly music, with the crummy set, with the endless juggling, this was one of the silliest things I’ve ever seen, and if people find in it spiritual solace then good luck to them.
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