Michael Tanner

Resigned despair

Riders to the Sea<br /> <em>Coliseum<br /> </em><br /> Ascanio in Alba<br /> <em> King’s Place</em>

issue 13 December 2008

Riders to the Sea
Coliseum


Ascanio in Alba
King’s Place


Vaughan Williams’s short opera Riders to the Sea was to have been conducted by Richard Hickox, but in the sad event it was played as a tribute to him, and conducted by Edward Gardner. It had a kind of appropriateness, but my own abiding memory of Hickox will be his wonderful, inspired conducting of the same composer’s The Pilgrim’s Progress at Sadler’s Wells a few months ago, which was revelatory for many of us. This setting of Synge’s grim little play is austere to a degree, but not as austere as it became at ENO. I came home rather bored by it, unlike, it seems, anyone else, and listened to the Meredith Davies recording of it, which is fiercely dramatic. At ENO it was performed almost as pure ritual, while the recording gives much more the impression that I think Vaughan Williams intended, which was something between ritual and naturalistic drama.

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