World premiere of new version of King Lear set to music

CRAWLEY’S Hawth Theatre plays host to a major event in British opera with a performance of Promised End, a new opera version of Shakespeare’s King Lear set to music by leading British composer Alexander Goehr.

This will be a world première production presented by English Touring Opera - the first operatic setting of King Lear by a British composer.

The show is directed by James Conway, general director of ETO - a man who refuses to believe that opera has to be by dead people.

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“People can be afraid of newer opera in a way they are not afraid to go to a new play or to see a new artist. I don’t know why. I suppose it is partly because people that run opera companies often go for the sure-fire guaranteed dozen to 15 pieces by dead people. Opera is so expensive to put on because it involves so many artists, and you can’t really do it with fewer.

“And so there is an adversity to risk which has perhaps communicated itself to the public.”

But as James says, in the year that La Traviata was first performed, there were probably a hundred complete duffers: the risks have to be taken for the new masterpieces to emerge.

And James reckons he has got one here.

“I had heard from a friend that Alexander Goehr was writing this with (librettist

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Sir) Frank Kermode. I had met Alexander three or four times at shows that we were doing, and he had liked our Janaceks. I heard that he was writing this new piece without a commission from a specific company. He just wanted to do it. It was very important for him personally to write it. I know that things had happened in his life that made him identify with the piece.”

And so James approached him - and Goehr chose English Touring Opera to premiere the piece, based on his kernel idea of Lear in Japanese, inspired by a dream. Goehr has stated that this will be his last opera.

“I would say that it is a very pure piece.

“The music is very dramatic and unusual. There are moments of great lyricism and great beauty.

“There are appropriately very strong and savage moments. Alexander has a dramatic sensibility because he has written for the stage a lot. He knows how long a scene should last.

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“I was quite scared of it at first, to be honest, but as we have worked on it, I have come to appreciate how everything is the way that it is. It is quite stark and offers lots of strong dramatic possibilities. It appeals to my aesthetic.”

Promised End is at The Hawth, Crawley, on Monday, November 1. Tickets on www.hawth.co.uk or 01293 553636.

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