Jonathan Dove’s Uprising is a new youth and community opera, premiered at Glyndebourne, though later this month there are performances, with different orchestral and choral forces, at Saffron Hall (whose trust co-commissioned it with Glyndebourne), and also in Edinburgh and Glasgow.
It’s an opera of distinct halves. We begin with a didactic parable, reminiscent of Brecht and Weill, introducing us to Lola Green (Ffion Edwards), whose activism leads to bullying at school and undermines relationships with her sister Zoe (Natasha Agarwal), father Clive (Ross Ramgobin), and mother Angela (Madeleine Shaw), a ghastly woman who views her daughter’s idealism as indicative of mental health issues.
The second act, meanwhile, slides towards magic realism, as damaged nature is given its own voice by multiple soloists and choruses after the fashion of Ravel’s L’Enfant et les Sortilèges, though Angela, unwavering in her belief that progress equates with urbanisation, catastrophically persists in destroying forests to make way for unnecessary roads. A big, static choral finale, more cantata than opera, demands we let nature renew itself after all we have done to it. But mother and daughter remain unreconciled – and perhaps irreconcilable – at the close.
The score score is eclectic, at times allusive. Rhythmic repetition, sometimes fierce and echoing Stravinsky or Adams, underpins Lola’s determination, while chic, insubstantial waltzes suggest Angela’s flippancy. Surging Wagnerian strings and horns characterise the forests and floods of Act II – a quiet reminder the Ring is also about damage to our planet. The work, however, is rooted in Dove’s writing for Glyndebourne Youth Opera and the Glyndebourne Community Chorus, direct yet complex, and utterly ravishing in the forest scenes with their overlapping counterpoint and textures.
They sing it fantastically, too, and are superbly directed, by Sinéad O’Neill. In Act I, the Youth Opera first bully, then encourage Lola, while the Community Chorus snipe and gossip disparagingly, all of it characterised in considerable, at times excruciatingly realistic detail. After the interval, however, beautifully choreographed sequences (Mike Ashcroft is the movement director) suggest the teeming life of the forest or the surge and swell of water.
The professional singers playing the protagonists are consistently impressive. Edwards sounds tireless and beautiful in the long, exacting central role, while Shaw is by turns funny and disquietingly malign. Ramgobin charts Clive’s gradual acceptance of his daughter’s beliefs with moving subtlety, and there’s magnificent singing from Edwin Kaye, as Quercus, the stoically suffering forest king. Andrew Gourlay conducts the Glyndebourne Sinfonia with terrific energy, while the call to protest is sounded onstage by some some awesome drumming from the Brighton and Hove Percussion Ensemble.
• Uprising is at Saffron Hall, Saffron Walden, on 15-16 March; then in Edinburgh and Glasgow.
