Read what our audiences had to say about Fiona Shaw's production of Riders to the Sea
Review from Claire
Not a review per say but a congratulations. I was unfamiliar with Luonnotar but it was the single most brilliant 10 minutes I have ever seen at the Coliseum. It was so intensely gripping both musically and visually and the brevity of the piece made it all the more striking. A simply stunning 10 minutes.
Review from Julian
My wife and I saw Riders to the Sea on 30th November.
Ralph Vaughan Williams' opera, using as a text the one-act tragedy by the Irish poet John Millington Synge, was premiered in 1937 at the London Royal College of Music in anticipation of the second world war, when the nation was still mourning its lost dead from WW1. Set in a particularly harsh environment, a sparsely populated clifftop on the Aran Islands off the western coast of Ireland, the opera is about death but also about the faith and renewed hope that can emerge from catastrophic loss.
Only 45 minutes long, Riders to the Sea is really a chamber piece, admittedly scored for a large orchestra. Largely multi-chromatic and sometimes atonal, the orchestra provides a deliberately unsettling and turmoil-like accompaniment for the leading role of the mother, Maurya, sung by a mezzo-soprano, who at the opening of the opera has already lost 4 of her 6 sons to the sea in fishing accidents. We then learn that a fifth is missing, suspected drowned. The last and sixth also drowns during the opera, and they are all mourned by Maurya and her two surviving daughters, Cathleen and Nora. In a poignant conclusion, the score moves seamlessly into a beautiful string elegy for the dead, and Maurya looks forward to the future in the knowledge that she can suffer from no further tragic losses.
The opera was produced by the well known Irish actress Fiona Shaw. It is difficult to interpret, not least because the action at sea must perforce take place offstage. The domestic scenes of poverty and wretchedness involving Maurya, Cathleen and Nora are enacted in a small hut on the clifftop. With dramatic designs by Dorothy Cross and Tom Pye, particularly with a huge slab of rockface on the side of the stage, much of the action within the hut was left to the imagination, in a set without walls or windows. To emphasise the drama, large upturned fishing boats are lowered slowly during the opera, together with a suspended corpse. The ghost of the fifth son - mimed by an actor - moves spookily through the action, unseen by his mother or sisters. The backdrop was an ingenious series of moving video images, depicting abstractly the action at sea.
In a matinee performance undertaken in the wake of the sudden death of its conductor Richard Hickox only 7 days previously, which must have added enormously to the sense of tragedy inherent in the piece, the replacement conductor Edward Gardiner and the ENO orchestra and soloists all acquitted themselves well. The mother was played by Patricia Bardon in a convincing and moving portrayal, and the two daughters by Kate Valentine and Claire Booth respectively.
The opera was preceeded by a beautiful performance of the rarely performed Sibelius tone poem, Luonnotar, set to a text from the Kalevala for soprano and orchestra, with an ingenious set depicting a boat at sea - seen from above - providing an interesting and not irrelevant lead-in to Riders to the Sea. Susan Gritton sang the soprano of part strongly, in Finnish, and in many ways it was the dramatic highlight of the short afternoon.
The two pieces were linked by a specially commissioned short musical interlude that seemed at odds in style with either the Sibelius or the Vaughan Williams, and it was redundant.
This was nevertheless a rare and much appreciated opportunity to see Riders to the Sea, an interesting work by an under-rated composer, who was more versatile than his routine performance history would suggest in the fifty years since his death.
