Krishna review - The Times
By Benjamin Poore
Thanks in part to King Charles, Tavener’s striking stage work has been rescued at Grange Park Opera. The score is a marvel
In the early 2000s the composer John Tavener began work on Krishna, a stage work capturing his lifelong fascination with Hinduism and spirituality. The composer had been brought to public attention with works such as Song for Athene (played at Princess Diana’s funeral), the luminous cello work The Protecting Veil and the hushed motet The Lamb, and his music’s blend of Greek Orthodox rigour and melodic radiance bewitched audiences and programmers.
But Krishna, written without commission, has languished unperformed since his death in 2013. It is now reborn by Grange Park Opera and the director David Pountney, a longstanding champion of the singular and esoteric.
There has also been an (offstage) role for the King, long an admirer of Tavener, who — as reported by The Times — first contacted Pountney to see if he would be interested in mounting the piece.
Tavener called Krishna a “mystic pantomime”. Its static, processional nature and inscrutable approach to character set it apart from the usual dramatic cut-and-thrust of opera and the narrative inevitability of a Bach Passion or Noh play that comes with it. Its tableaux are animated by dance, its story — bildungsroman plus apotheosis — narrated by the baritone Ross Ramgobin, whose darkly portentous pronouncements occasionally break out into flights of lyrical rapture.
The stage is framed by large drums, played by Nao Masuda, providing ritualistic punctuation between the 13 scenes. The eponymous divine protagonist is represented by four singers — two women, two men — who detail various playful and rapturous episodes.
Costumes and design, by Rachana Jadhav, call on Indian art from the past 500 years, with frieze-like profiles animated by glittering jewellery and fabulous wigs. The chorus is stacked up, seated, in a palatial backdrop, only coming down to writhe in the purifying fire of the opera’s denouement. Shobana Jeyasingh’s choreography sometimes feels like filler, but at points catches fire, as the dancers hold the boy Krishna aloft when the mud in his mouth reveals the beyond.
The score, set to Tavener’s own libretto, in Sanskrit and English, is a marvel, conducted unselfconsciously by Mark Shanahan. A quarter-hour love duet recalls the agony and ecstasy of Wagner and Scriabin, woven from an insistently catchy tune. Set against this richness are chant-like choruses, glowering chorales and riotous, primal fusillades from brass and percussion.
Traditional vocal virtuosity is found in soaring, stratospheric writing for the crystalline voices of Julia Sitkovetsky and Nazan Fikret; an unearthly halo comes from a choir of eight flutes, played from on high. A soft-fringed quotation from Mozart’s Piano Sonata No 10, at the close, is disarming and devastating.
Without the composer present to craft it, there are longueurs and effortful sequences. The ritual dimension of the piece sits oddly with the luxurious staging, which conceals its transcendence; then again, Tavener liked fast, fancy cars as much as his ascetic robes.
But Wasfi Kani, the swashbuckling head of GPO, is one of the few people on the country house opera circuit who dare to mount repertoire off the beaten track. Krishna’s manifold imperfections are nonetheless striking and inviting.