The Adèsives were out in force at Covent Garden last Monday for the UK première of their hero’s third opera, The Exterminating Angel, unable to contain their rapture until the piece was over, yelling their excitement even at the interval. Thomas Adès’s opera is closely based on Buñuel’s film of 1962, with the text adapted by the composer and Tom Cairns, who also directs the production, which was first seen last July in Salzburg, with a cast mainly identical to the Royal Opera’s.
I hadn’t seen it before Monday, but have listened several times to my pirate recording and hoped that seeing it (with indispensable surtitles) would clarify the opera for me and help me to sort out my responses. It didn’t — excellent, indeed exemplary as the production is — and has left me feeling confused and uneasy about the piece. The sheer fact that it is an adaptation of a notorious surrealist film forced me to reconsider my attitude to that movement, but I have reached the same view that I have long held: surrealist art is pretentious, vapid, trivial and boring.
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