Better to abandon Wagner

Beware the opera composer who cites Wagner as a formative influence.

Whatever Wagner's merits (discuss), his influence is often suffocating. The young Scottish composer Stuart MacRae was no opera fan until being "completely blown away" by Tristan und Isolde, and The Assassin Tree, his first opera (receiving its London premiere), never quite shakes off Wagner's baleful spell.

The fault lies less with MacRae's music than with Simon Armitage's libretto, which, in re-telling the myth of Diana the Huntress, serves up the requisite blend of love, sex and murder, but fails to find a language to bring that sacred trinity to life. The four characters sing, not to but at each other, in rhetoric that is stiff but not in the least tumescent.

MacRae does his best, allowing much of the text to be heard. He gives his singers music that is flexible and often rather lovely, expressive without being expressionist. Yet with so little action and so many words, the 12 players of Britten Sinfonia (tightly controlled by Garry Walker) become the centre of musical attention; for them MacRae provides ample subtlety and colour, but they cannot carry the drama on their own.

The production, by Emio Greco and Pieter C Scholten, is more balletic than operatic, the elaborately choreographed gestures falling somewhere between bloody ritual and silent-movie emoting. The singers' movements are sometimes doubled and sometimes led by silent supernumeraries, but it is hard to escape the feeling that, faced with an intractable drama, the staging has to work overtime.

Through all that, the singers cannot be faulted. Gillian Keith's Diana is both sex goddess and goddess of sex, while Paul Whelan's Priest is coldly messianic. By contrast, Peter Van Hulle is an arrogant and priapic Slave, while Colin Ainsworth's blustering Youth recalls Wagner's Siegfried. But that's enough of Wagner.

Royal Opera House & Scottish Opera: The Assassin Tree
Royal Opera House
Floral Street, WC2E 9DD