Akhnaten is the third opera in Philip Glass’s “Portrait Trilogy” which consists of three operas describing in more or less abstract terms the lives of individuals whose thinking could be said to have changed the world, the other two pieces being Einstein On The Beach (1975) and Satyagraha (about Ghandi, 1979).That’s science and politics covered then, so who was Akhnaten? Well, to save you clicking away to Wikipedia, he was Pharaoh of Egypt, father of Tutankhamun and (arguably) the inventor of Monotheism – belief in a single god – getting there just a bit before the early followers of the Judeo-Christian God. His chosen deity was Aten, that big golden disc that hangs over the horizon, dominating every waking and sleeping moment of life in Egypt in the fourteenth century BC. As religions go, there have probably been worse ideas, eh? (That’s a rhetorical question; please don’t write to the editor).
How, then, to describe Akhnaten as a piece of theatre? It’s quite stunningly beautiful, let's start there, and Akhnaten’s Hymn To The Sun in act 2, hauntingly sung by counter-tenor Anthony Roth Constanzo and sensitively but brilliantly lit by Bruno Poet, is something that will stay with me for some time to come. The difficulty for a critic is that the usual rules of musical storytelling, character development, harmonic progression, even melody, don’t really apply here; the experience is all.
Glass’s music is drawn from a combination of elements of the most basic and minimal aspects of western harmony combined with the time-defying repetitive structures of eastern music and, somehow, it just works. (For those who may be phobic about 20th century music, it is never inaccessible and it’s probably worth mentioning that my 16 year old son, attending his first opera and usually more at home in the audience of a rock concert, was enthralled throughout, though he would have liked it to be a bit louder.) Much of the text is in ancient Egyptian or Hebrew and, unusually for ENO, there is no translation. Akhnaten and Nefertiti’s love duet contains little or no text at all, being made up of a series of repeated vowel sounds (devilishly and deceptively difficult for the singers in terms of breath control), yet in spite of all this, or maybe because of it, meaning is never absent.
Physical movement throughout is glacial and exquisitely restrained, only interrupted by the welcome physical interventions of the Gandini juggling troupe. The orchestra, under the command of conductor Karen Kamensek (stripped of violins for a darker, more sombre sound) gives a master class in control and concentration. ENO’s trusty chorus responds magnificently as ever to the demands of the piece and offers bursts of vocal energy just when they are needed.
And I’ve avoided saying this long enough: For this fine company to have lost such a chunk of its core funding from the Arts Council and for so many of its workforce (including, but not limited to, the chorus) to have their livelihoods put in jeopardy is a national disgrace. Support them if you can.
I love the little quirks of history that define us as the product of chaos rather than some grand scheme, so I've long been fascinated by the almost farcical circumstances surrounding the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand, the event that precipitated the bloody muddle of the First World War.