Gerald Barry loved playing organ for Protestants as they allowed him a lie in. Then they found out he wasn’t Protestant and sacked him. When he moved to a Catholic church, he was forced up at the crack of dawn, so he punished the congregation by not giving them the chance to breathe between verses.
He has a similarly cruel approach to the singers in his latest opera Alice’s Adventures Under Ground, whose voices he puts through the wringer, compelling them to squawk or chunter — or recite the ‘Jabberwocky’ in German. Barry has to be one of the most enjoyably contrary composers alive, but he is also, I fear, a sociopath, and I’m not sure the two things are entirely unrelated.
It was almost painful to watch/listen to the great Barbara Hannigan as Alice, yelping her way through Wonderland. But then in this world of unbirthdays, it perhaps made perfect sense that the singers were being forced to unsing.
Lewis Carroll’s text is unforgiving. The curiosity of most of those who’ve attempted to set it has gone unrewarded. It has a tendency to suck composers in and spit them out, the rabbit-hole resembling not so much a freeing portal into a dreamscape as the debilitating gravitational pull of a black hole — too chaotic a place for anyone to do anything but be chewed up.
But in Gerald Barry, Carroll has found a kindred spirit — maybe even met his match. Anything you can subvert, I can subvert better. Carroll’s nonsense verse is translated into Russian then set to ‘It’s a Long Way to Tipperary’. A game of croquet is accompanied by everyone shouting the rules of piano technique in French. The chorus of daisies becomes a shouty male quartet, the sleepy dormouse a female Brian Blessed.
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