Mark-Anthony Turnage, Greek (1988)

This is my four hundred fourth opera, so please insert a "file not found" joke here.

I had previously known Turnage from his very good Anna Nicole, one of the first contemporary operas I ever saw. This one is his first: his music teacher--none other than Hans Werner Henze--kept encouraging him to write one for a music festival he was helping to arrange, and this is the result, based on a 1980 play which transplants Oedipus Rex to a working-class London neighborhood of the time. All the characters sing in Cockney accents.

I mean, if you know the story, you have a pretty good idea. Eddy is a kid trying to make his way. He leaves his parents (who in the past heard some absurd prediction from a carnival fortune teller: "you want to have a bunk-up wiv yer mum?"). They're too much for him, so he leaves. Outside the city is pounded by plague and police brutality, and yup, this just got too real. He stops in a diner where he gets in a fracas with the owner, kills him, and gets with his wife, who years ago had a baby who disappeared and okay I think you get where this is going to go. There's a Sphinx about whom he goes to deal with, by answering a riddle--which is the traditional one only with a Bawdy Twist which you can probably figure out just from the fact that I called it "bawdy." He wins, but the plague is still ongoing, and the Terrible Truth comes out--only he ultimately decides, screw this, I'm not gonna blind myself, she's not going to hang herself, it's all about LOVE, baby! Grab your own destiny!

Gritty stuff, albeit with a surprise upbeat ending, but I hell of like it. The music, as near as I can remember, is similar to Anna Nicole. Jazzy stuff, somewhat atonal, but highly rhythmic. A lot of percussion. No, it may not be exactly what a traditionalist is looking for in an opera, but I liked it a lot, and this recording takes full advantage of the fact that it's not staged to do a lot of cool video stuff. The feminist sphinx (played by two separate women, for some reason) are really cool, reminding my somehow of Angela Carter. I am definitely a fan of Turnage.

And because I have nowhere else to put it, I'll put this here: the New York City Opera almost went under a few years ago. Why? Because they did a production of Anna Nicole, and one of the fuckass Koch brothers--not sure if it was the one currently in Hell or the other one--was offended by the portrayal of the old billionaire she marries, who was apparently a Koch Industries investor, an withdrew funding. Obviously, the main problem here is that the arts are dependent on the good will of psychopathic plutocrat freaks, rather than the Kochs per se, but I hope we can still find a little room in our hearts and our guillotines for them personally.