More woe for Oedipus

I had high hopes for Julian Anderson’s first opera, Thebans. Premièred at the Coliseum last Saturday, it promised to mark a departure from the trendiness of ENO’s recent commissions, Nico Muhly’s Two Boys, for example, or the dreadful Sunken Garden — in fact, ENO’s next season seems to reflect a company at last a little less enamoured of innovation for its own sake. Thebans, the advance publicity suggested, was to be a serious, grown-up work, closer in spirit, perhaps, to Detlev Glanert’s Caligula, of which ENO gave the UK première two years ago.

The company had put a lot of faith in Anderson, currently composer-in-residence at Wigmore Hall and a master of orchestral colour and texture. But he’d been mulling over an opera based on Sophocles’ three Theban Plays for a couple of decades, we were told, and was collaborating on the piece with Frank McGuinness, who has already produced a couple of Sophocles adaptations for the theatre (and who, amusingly, his biography in ENO’s programme also claims ‘is currently working on an opera cycle on the Oedipus Trilogy for ROH’).