Margaret Attwood’s scary story of existence under a pernicious Christian fundamentalist regime, The Handmaid’s Tale, made grim reading as a novel, was unbearable to watch as a TV series, and wins few converts to theocracy in the operatic adaptation by Danish composer Poul Ruders which has just had a new staging at English National Opera. 

Nearly three hours of relentless misery, to a degree that begged for something in the way of light relief (tap-dancing chorus girls? A custard pie routine?), it was emotional assault and battery that no gentle soul could sit through undisturbed. But the appalling darkness of this piece had power – effectively controlled by Ruders’ music which responds to Attwood’s narrative in nuanced terms. The blackness comes in forty shades that never let your ear retreat into anaesthetised indifference. And I’d call it one of the outstanding operas of the past half-century.

This ENO production was outstanding too, and had a star of magnitude in Kate Lindsey who sang the central role of Offred, the young woman whose enforced sexual slavery as a “handmaid” is sanctioned by twisted readings of the Old Testament. The message – from Ruders and Attwood alike – is how easily religion can be hijacked into cruelty, how devotion turns into oppression, and how fear replaces love. I only hope it was absorbed in some way by those members of the audience who turned up for the first night dressed in “handmaids” habits. Creepy.

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Large-scale orchestras these days have lost the habit of performing Bach, who has become the territory of smaller, “period” forces. So when the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic took on a St John Passion last month it was a rare encounter – which they took seriously, carefully, and under the direction of period-specialist Jeanette Sorrell who had flown in from America where she runs her own elite ensemble Apollo’s Fire.

In Liverpool she had some problems trying to get the RLPO’s conventional amateur chorus to sing with the energy and sharpness you’d get from sleek professionals. But she had better luck with the orchestra whose numbers were reduced  down (to the annoyance of one ticket-holder I heard complaining that the low body count was poor value for money). And with an element of staging that gave Roderick Williams’s Christus an uncommon focus (it’s a perversity of German Passion settings that the baritone Jesus never gets the musical prominence of the tenor Evangelist), Sorrell made good use of something that makes Liverpool’s Philharmonic Hall one of my favourite UK venues: a spatial trick in the design that makes it feel more like a ‘room’ than a ‘hall’. Even from back rows you can entertain the fantasy of reaching out and touching the performers, with no us-and-them divide. And for this Passion I felt drawn into the narrative in ways I hadn’t reckoned for. Which made it special.

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But another special Bach experience last month came in a very different place: the cool, concrete austerity of the modernist chapel at Malling Abbey, Kent, where a community of Anglican Benedictine nuns sometimes allow events in the local Music@Malling festival to penetrate their sanctuary. 

The festival is small but punches way above its weight with smart ideas, impressively delivered; and here it programmed an entire day based around the six Bach Brandenburg Concertos, which you don’t often hear done in totality. But the clincher was that the organisers had commissioned six composers of our own time to write a musical response to the concertos – one each – as a sort of sonic partner.

The result was like a conversation back and forth across three centuries. None of the new works stooped to being cod-baroque, they spoke their own distinctive languages; but the relationships they made with Bach, the points at which they met or drew away from the original material, were fascinating. As was the selection of composers, representing  everything from meticulous modernism (Brian Elias) to more lyrical contemporary (Deborah Pritchard, Joseph Phibbs) and cinematic (Michael Price).

This day of concerts in the sunlit chapel – packed out, with the nuns there too – made one of the most memorable musical experiences I’ve had in ages. Everything felt cherished and delivered from the heart by the formidable musicians of Chamber Domaine with harpsichordist Steven Devine and conductor Thomas Kemp (who runs Music@Malling). You could ask no more – except for a repeat performance which, I’m told, may happen later in the year.

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Within the Oxbridge chapel choirs there’s a degree of jockeying for position; and a recent riser has been Merton which directs more effort and resource into its singing these days than it did when I was knocking around Oxford as a undergraduate. I hadn’t heard it for some time; but at a festival event for Passiontide it was on fine form in Vaughan Williams’s G Minor Mass and works by Poulenc, Byrd, MacMillan… alongside the premiere of a substantial organ suite, And God Said, by Francis Grier.

It helps that Merton Chapel has one of the better Oxford acoustics; but that aside, a lot of work has clearly gone into creating a well-balanced, clear, strong, stable sound from these young voices. And it’s paid off, handsomely.

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