Boy, you can say this is "for church performance," but that would require an awfully large-scale church, I feel. Britten wrote it after visiting Japan and seeing noh drama; it's based on noh play, but converted to have Christian themes.
The story is simple: there's this river, see. And there's a "Madwoman" who (along with a "traveller") wants to cross it: she's looking for her son, who's been missing for a long time. The ferryman tells them a story about a mean guy who came by some time ago with a child he'd kidnapped. He was sick so the mean guy left him there, and in spite of the locals trying to help him, he died. This is the woman's son, obviously. So that's sad, but then she hears here son's voice assuring her that the dead will live again and that they'll be together in Heaven. So now she's redeemed and not mad anymore. Finis.
It certainly has a different feel to it than other Britten operas I've seen. The music is sparse, almost ambient in places, and there's obviously a strong liturgical feel. There's a very good performance here, with English subs and everything. One interesting thing is that the Madwoman is a skirt role--because noh performances traditionally have all-male casts. Apparently, in the original production of the opera, all the singers wore noh masks, but not here; I think performances nowadays are less stylized than Britten had envisioned. Which is fine, but you do have to wonder: the singer here has absolutely no signifiers of femininity added, which is obviously the right call: any such would inevitably be read as comical. But done this way, it's still borderline surreal. I don't know if there's a good solution.
But really, it's no biggie. I wouldn't say my breath was exactly taken away, but I still liked this a lot. It's cool that Britten was down with stretching himself artistically as he does here.
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