With The Importance of Being Earnest, first seen in 2011, Gerald Barry created something rare in contemporary music – a comic opera that is not only genuinely funny, but one that just might establish itself in the international repertory. After the zany, surreal wit of Oscar Wilde, Lewis Carroll seemed another obvious source for Barry, and so we have Alice’s Adventures Under Ground, which had its world premiere performance in concert in Los Angeles and, a week later, this was its first European performance with the same seven-strong cast and conductor, Thomas Adès, and the Britten Sinfonia in the notional pit.
Though Barry has opted for the original title of the first of Carroll’s Alice books, his libretto also raids the sequel, Through the Looking Glass, for episodes such as Tweedledum and Tweedledee, Humpty Dumpty, and Jabberwocky – sung in Russian, French and German and set to the tune of A Long Way to Tipperary. The action speeds by at an astonishing rate, so that scenes are elided and jostle for space from the moment the White Rabbit announces that he’ll be late, and Alice promptly topples down the rabbit hole after him.
The whole thing had been scheduled to last 70 minutes, but the Barbican performance was over in well under an hour. There’s little delineation between the scenes, and though Barry’s score is crammed with stage directions and precise indications of the way every line should be delivered, how such a breathless piece of music theatre could be made to work on stage remains to be seen.
But in concert, thanks to surtitles, at least some of the conceits of the text and the musical equivalents Barry creates could be relished. So too could the brilliance of the performances, especially from Barbara Hannigan as Alice, got up in a suitably winsome dress, and handling Barry’s fearsomely challenging soprano writing – with its torrents of syllables that habitually run up to top C and sometimes beyond – as if it was the easiest thing in the world.
The other singers all took multiple roles: Allison Cook’s included the Red Queen and the Queen of Hearts, Hilary Summers the White Queen and the Dormouse, and so on. The four male singers – Allan Clayton, Peter Tantsits, Mark Stone and Joshua Bloom – are sometimes used as a quartet, too, but Bloom’s big moment comes as Humpty Dumpty when he sings his song to Beethoven’s Ode to Joy, which Barry also used in The Importance of Being Earnest, although it doesn’t quite haunt this opera in the way it does the former.
The orchestral writing, for a Mozart-sized band with a few additions such as a tuba and a percussion section including a pair of of wind machines, is just as fiercely challenging, with its louche solo lines, and rampaging ostinatos and toccatas, and was superbly delivered by the Britten Sinfonia. The uneasy menace that lurks behind some of Carroll’s writing comes out vividly in the orchestra, too – it’s one of the many multi-layered aspects of the text that Barry realises ingeniously, even if at the moment his work sometimes seems more like an Alice cantata than a viable opera.
