In Wednesday’s (8/14) Boston Globe (subscription required), Jeremy Eichler writes, “Successful, serious contemporary operas are exceedingly rare in today’s classical music world, but the composer George Benjamin and the playwright Martin Crimp have created one in Written on Skin. The work premiered to great acclaim last summer at the Aix-en-Provence Festival and has made the rounds to several European opera houses, arriving on Monday night at Tanglewood’s Ozawa Hall for its U.S. premiere as the culminating event in this year’s Festival of Contemporary Music. On its surface it is an opera, brimming with beauty and violence, about the emancipatory power of art. Adapted from a 13th-century Provencal legend, the plot centers on a brutal feudal lord, who commissions an artist to create an illuminated manuscript on animal skin. [Martin] Crimp’s crisp libretto purposefully sidesteps the conventions of operatic naturalism by embracing the artifice at the center of this art for.… [Benjamin’s] score is indeed a marvel, astonishing in its timbral precision and in its balance of flexibility and sweep, with moments of local drama set off against a meticulously integrated whole. As a composer Benjamin is known as a master colorist, but evidently inspired by the subject of medieval illumination, he has outdone himself here.” The performers, Fellows of the Tanglewood Music Center, were led by the composer.
Posted August 15, 2013
