Stuart MacRae, Anthropocene (2019)

Well, this is nothing if not timely; as you know the idea is that we're living in an era, the Anthropocene, defined by human impact on the planet. Which...yeah, seems all too plausible. Now, in opera form! Well, kind of. This is one of those kind of weird-looking things that I didn't get around to when it was on Operavision, but of course I downloaded it, and now here we are.

So in northern Greenland, there's a research ship named King's Anthropocene, after its somewhat megalomaniacal owner, Harry King. Also on the ship: King's daughter Daisy; the ship's captain, Ross; a sailor, Vasco; a husband-and-wife scientist team, Prentice and Charles; and a journalist, Miles. They have a problem, because winter has come and they've gotten stuck in the ice, due to having stuck around to retrieve...something stuck in a block of ice. Upon breaking open said block of ice, it turns out that "something" is a young woman, alive, known only as "Ice." She speaks English, but in an unclear, abstruce way. Don't get too attached to these people, 'cause they ain't all making it out of here alive!

Obviously, with a title like that, this can't not be topical, but it certainly isn't in an obvious way. Which, hey, is fine; you don't need your art to be obvious. Without spoiling anything, the idea of sacrifice is central to the story. How this applies to the issue of climate change is left, more or less, as an exercise for the viewer. It's a reasonably gripping story, though the ending does seem to be a bit overly rushed and muddled, and while I'm certainly not saying that the opera should be didactic, I do think doing a bit more to ground its themes wouldn't have come amiss.

The music, well...I mean, it's fine. Not actively unpleasant to listen to, and sometimes appropriately atmospheric. But it's hard for me to imagine anyone wanting to just listen to it for its own sake, and while none of the singers are bad per se, the only one really given the chance to make much of an impression is Jennifer France as Ice. I really appreciate the ambition and the willingness to take opera in an usual direction, but this is definitely one of those admire-more-than-love kind of dealies.