Throughout his career, Nimbus has faithfully chronicled George Benjamin’s output. The label has nearly all his major works in its catalogue, and now releases Benjamin’s fourth opera with a libretto by Martin Crimp, which was first performed at the Aix-en-Provence festival in July last year, where this recording was made. By the time the production of Picture a day like this reached Covent Garden’s Linbury theatre two months later, the cast had changed and Benjamin was no longer the conductor, so it is good to have the chance to hear it with the original Aix lineup. That was headed by Marianne Crebassa as the Woman who, seeking a miracle to return her child to life, has a day to find someone who is truly happy, while Anna Prohaska is Zabelle, who tends the garden in which the Woman finds, if not the miracle she is looking for, then a way of coming to terms with her loss.
Both singers seem to inhabit their characters effortlessly. Right from the unaccompanied recitative with which she opens the opera, Crebassa combines determination and steeliness with a suggestion of vulnerability as she undertakes her fruitless quest, while beneath her serenity, Prohaska manages to convey that Zabelle’s path to acceptance has not been an easy one. The other members of the cast take multiple roles in the Woman’s search: Beate Mordal and Cameron Shahbazi are a pair of lovers, and a composer and her assistant; John Brancy a collector and an artisan; all three are excellent.
If the fairytale ambiguity of Picture a day like this is much closer to Benjamin and Crimp’s first collaboration, Into the Little Hill, than it is to the fierce, stark tragedies of Written on Skin and Lessons in Love and Violence, then the beauty of Benjamin’s instrumental lines, every colour and every texture so precisely imagined, and the easy grace of his vocal writing, which always preserves the integrity of the text, have been constants throughout. There are moments when the action could move more quickly, and its basic premise seems a little too mechanical, but the jewel-like precision of it is always impressive.
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