Brett Dean’s opera based on Hamlet – note the composer’s own “based on” formulation – premieres at the Glyndebourne festival in June 2017. Dean has been building towards the finished work in a number of recent compositions, with From Melodious Lay, a treatment of Hamlet and Ophelia’s relationship, the latest. This BBC Symphony Orchestra performance under the assured direction of Joshua Weilerstein more than whetted the appetite.
Whether these scenes for soprano, tenor and orchestra transfer in whole or in part into the opera remains to be seen. The scale of the orchestration may struggle to be accommodated in the Glyndebourne pit. But Dean’s “diffraction,” a setting of Shakespeare’s words from the three surviving editions of the play, with some lines reassigned from other characters to the two principals, clearly points to the essentially psychological direction of the treatment. The troubled and oppressive desires of Hamlet and Ophelia are expressed in the slip and slide of eerily erotic harmonies. Allan Clayton, next summer’s Hamlet, commanded the appropriate princely urgency; but Allison Bell’s fragile Ophelia was the musical and dramatic focus. A boldly written orchestral interlude marked the contrast from the music’s interior world.
Weilerstein began the evening with his fellow American Joseph Hallman’s atmospheric ricordi decomposti, an enticingly scored chamber orchestral setting of vocal music by Shakespeare’s contemporary Carlo Gesualdo. Here too, nothing was quite as it seemed, as harmonies flickered and dissolved, cymbals shivered amid the apparently assured renaissance tonalities and the string players whispered and sighed spookily to themselves as they played. After all this instability and fragmentation, Rachmaninov’s Symphonic Dances, after the interval, felt like exactly what it was: a blaze of orchestral light. It also gave the impressive Weilerstein the opportunity to showcase the crispness and rhythmic control of his conducting in an established part of the repertoire.