REVIEW: 8 Songs for a Mad King

Reading Time: 3 minutes

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Rosie Middleton redraws the role – broken instruments, unbroken attention 

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There is a particular kind of attention that only comes from being in the room. Not the attention of the reviewer cataloguing programme notes, but something physical registering detail that critical distance would otherwise smooth over. Manchester Camerata earned that attention on Saturday night.

The evening was programmed as a controlled descent. Errollyn Wallen’s By Gis and by Saint Charity arrived first and acquitted itself immediately. The piece is compact with Ophelia’s interiority refracted through the string quartet, who both accompany and accuse, the word shame recurring with the flat insistence of something that has been internalised rather than resolved. Rebecca Hardwick navigated its demands sustaining a register of barely contained hysteria without tipping into caricature. As an opener, it set a high bar for what followed.

Simon Parkin’s new arrangement of Schumann’s Kreisleriana for chamber ensemble occupied the remainder of the first half with considerable ambition. The conceit of hearing Schumann’s most confessional solo piano work disaggregated across multiple voices paid dividends: a duet for cello and piano held the room, and the arrangement’s redistribution of melodic material between flute, clarinet and strings produced moments of unexpected colour. If the piece occasionally struggled to sustain momentum across the gaps between movements, necessitated by ensemble adjustments, and more disruptive here than the composer’s own pauses would have been. That is less a criticism of the arrangement’s quality than of the logistical challenges inherent in realising it. A first half running to over an hour tested the audience’s patience slightly, though the musicianship throughout was not in question. 

The second half recovered entirely. Rosie Middleton took the stage in a red dress and Peter Maxwell Davies’s 8 Songs for a Mad King announced itself as the reason the evening existed. Originally written for baritone, the role was composed for a vocal range of near-impossible extremity, and the decision to cast a mezzo-soprano introduced a layer of interpretive interest that went beyond novelty. Middleton’s King George is not merely a gender-swapped reading of an existing dramatic logic; the performance carried its own argument, the formal incongruity between voice and role becoming a productive instability. Authority and dissolution occupied the same register, which is perhaps closer to the work’s actual subject than the conventionally heroic baritone tradition might suggest.

The staging was restrained where it needed to be and decisive where it mattered. For much of the work, proximity to the ensemble felt like the right choice such as  the libretto’s insistence on intimacy between the King and his musicians, on occasion, undermined by the distance the staging imposed, and a performance in the round might have made those negotiations feel more urgent. Company Chameleon’s light-touch movement direction nonetheless served the score well, never overwhelming the musical line.

The smashing of the violin was handled unapologetically. It is a gesture the work has always contained, and productions approach it with varying degrees of conviction; this one did not flinch. What made it land as more than spectacle was the context in which it arrived, an evening that had, from Wallen’s opening minutes, been asking questions about music’s relationship to suffering, about whether art made in response to mental anguish constitutes a form of witness or a form of appropriation, and about what it costs to perform either. The violin’s destruction offered no answer, which is precisely its value.

Middleton’s final minutes with gradual convergence of the ensemble around her, the lights fading on a line of standing players were as well executed as anything in the programme. Manchester Camerata demonstrated, across the evening as a whole, the particular kind of institutional courage that avant-garde programming in a mainstream venue requires. 

8 Songs for a Mad King’s run concluded on 6th June at King’s Place, London.