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The standard of singing and acting is astonishingly high, in fact leaves nothing at all to be desired. PUSH! is the same kind of thing as Jonathan Dove’s Flight, a situation-opera which owes everything to smart staging and expert versatile performers; but whereas Flight is outstaying its welcome, PUSH! will presumably go the way of Tête à Tête’s other shows, and disappear except in the affectionate memories of those who saw it. The company, which under-advertises, has a website which I recommend consulting to see where, when and with what it is going to turn up next.
Though one could make modest but sensible claims for the social significance of PUSH!, it doesn’t advertise itself under that aegis. Its strength is that it has no pretensions but would fulfil some modest ones if it did. The next evening, in one of those suspiciously pat operatic contrasts, I was at an event of which precisely the opposite was true. A performance of Mozart’s unfinished opera Zaide at the Barbican was advertised as ‘an anti-slavery opera for the 21st century’, and the first 25 minutes of the evening were taken up with addresses from the platform by the director Peter Sellars, the director of Anti-Slavery International and the chief executive of the Poppy project, which supports women who have been sold into sexual slavery. What we were told was upsetting and disturbing, and there can be no question as to the scale and the horror of human trafficking at present. But how did that sit with the subsequent performance of Zaide, with parts of Thamos interspersed?
So far as I was concerned it was an occasion for embarrassment and the boredom which is the result of having two radically dissimilar claims made on one’s attention. Sellars, of course, insists that they are not dissimilar, and indeed that Mozart can be shown to be a leading abolitionist. Whether he was in his life is neither here nor there, and the evidence is not impressive. But would anyone conclude from any of his works, unless they had their own axe to grind, that that was a preoccupation of his? One thing that makes me suspicious is the number of times Sellars is delighted to find that the great artists of the past share his concerns, whether it is in the macabre rituals of state executions or the grim realities of slavery. Since Zaide is a torso, Sellars is able (‘empowered’, he would no doubt say) to construct his own narrative on which to hang its music. And since the music is for much of its too-brief course extremely beautiful, indeed among the most beautiful that Mozart had composed by the time he was 23, it is well worth listening to. But at the Barbican we had the usual Sellars props, with ethnically diverse actors and singers, the slaves, slumbering on the stage in coarse sleeping bags, and a thin story involving non-characters being rudimentarily acted out and sung. Most absurdly, the passages of melodrama, in the original sense, were merely orchestral fragments played without dialogue, to no effect whatever. Sellars’s excited exhortations to hear the rage in Mozart’s music had the reverse of the desired effect.
The musical performance, with Concerto Köln under Louis Langrée, was sensitive and lively, and Hyunah Yu delivered the lovely ‘Ruhe sanft’ with an intimate tone which temporarily relieved the irritation I was experiencing at the whole occasion. In fact it was exactly not a whole occasion: the statistics and stories we were told to begin with either prevented one from listening with appropriate attention to Mozart’s music, or had to be forgotten so that one could.
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