So do director Neil Armfield, who expertly manages the interplay of swordplay and song, and conductor Nicholas Carter, who holds the sparking, roaring machine of a score together with impeccable finesse. In the duel, an extended ensemble scene in which rays of overlapping violence, hatred, and vindictiveness go zipping across the stage in all directions, he excavates clarity from chaos. Peter Maxwell Davies’s Eight Songs for a Mad King and Le Grand Macabre by Gyorgy Ligeti come to mind, both masterful illustrations of the berserk.ĭean’s music is often brilliant and never less than deft. But in its musical exploration of a shattered spirit, Dean’s score belongs with an extravagantly theatrical mid-20th-century idiom that has never gotten much traction at the Met. There are other resonances with the company’s current season, too: a flibbertigibbety mad scene (as in Lucia di Lammermoor), a mighty prince-versus-king confrontation (as in Don Carlos), an adult child raging at a father’s murder and a mother’s quick remarriage ( Elektra). Hamlet is the second new(ish) opera to hit the Met this season, and like Terence Blanchard’s Fire Shut Up in My Bones, it’s a tour de force of suicidal desperation. Whether you’re happy to follow him on that trek may depend on your taste for darkness and how long you’re willing to dwell there. And virtually ever present on the stage, stumbling through this projection of his haunted mind, is the Dane himself. Mists of electronic sound drift through the house. Plumes of choral singing spring from unseen recesses. Percussion clatters and whispers from high ledges. The score casts a strobing light on his interior world, a dark and rugged terrain full of underground bogs and jagged ridges. Photo: Karen Almond/Met Operaįrom the first volcanic rumble oozing out of the walls in Brett Dean’s opera Hamlet, we know we are at the bottom of a very deep crevasse: the protagonist’s psyche.
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