Quartett

Imagine if Samuel Beckett wrote a soft porn script in Italian, which was turned into English via through Google Translate. Then you would have the libretto for this pretentious curio from Luca Francesconi.

The plot is based on a 1981 play by Heiner Müller in which Vicomte de Valmont and Marquise de Merteuil – the principal couple from Laclos’s novel ‘Les Liaisons Dangereuses’ (1782) – play out an abusive sex game in which they taunt each other, he pretending to be Tourvel, the married lover who spurned her, and she Cécile, the young woman he seduced and whose reputation he destroyed (hence the ‘quartett’ of the title). However, this absurd interaction, far from being a sublime vehicle for exploring the human condition, is tedious in the extreme.

The music is another matter, though, and is played impressively by London Sinfonietta under Andrew Gourlay, with Sound Intermedia blending recordings of the performers and a choir with the live music. The score is startlingly original – sporadically brooding then explosive and excoriating.

The vocal writing, however, like so much modern music, is endlessly repetitive and stuck in shrill, imperfect cadences, never knowingly consonant.

There is no faulting the singers, though. Soprano Angelica Voje and baritone Mark Stone are impressively committed and inhabit the absurd world believably. Sadly, they are required to stumble around singing adolescent doggerel at each other. It all mercifully ends after 80 minutes when the man drinks poisoned wine and battery acid.

The staging, though, does look terrific. Soutra Gilmour’s set is a building site on half a motorway flyover under which the orchestra are seated. Bruno Poet’s lighting is troubling and atmospheric, and Ravi Deepres’s projections on hanging drapes above complement the dark emotions on stage. But it seems a shame to waste such impressive production values on an opera that would make a much better concert piece, rather than the tawdry and unengaging interaction between two unreal figures taking centre stage.