Turning a set inside out for triple action

Michael Dervan reports from the Aldeburgh Festival in Sussex, where a new chamber opera by Harrison Birtwistle offered audiences a musically fascinating evening.

Harrison Birtwistle, 70 this year, has long been obsessed with Greek myth and the workings of Greek theatre. But the starting point of his new chamber opera, The Io Passion, premièred at the Aldeburgh Festival, was not the myth of Io, which tells of Io's seduction by Zeus, her transformation into a heifer so that Zeus can hide his misdemeanour from his wife Herma, who sees through his ruse and summons a gadfly to pursue and torture the unfortunate Io.

Birtwistle's starting point was the image of the stage set, which shows on the one side, "The exterior of an early 20th- century house. A Magritte style streetlamp," and on the other, the same scene from inside. Each of the opera's two roles - a Man and a Woman, no names - is triply represented (each by two singers and an actor) so that the exterior and interior action - letters through letter boxes, blinds being pulled, tea being poured - plays simultaneously.

This simultaneity is only one of the work's duplications. The two characters, who shared a sexual experience on holiday in Lerna in Greece (scene of Io's downfall) have reacted differently to the affair. He wants more, she wants none of it. His hesitant delivery of a letter and her reaction to it are re-enacted seven times during the opera, each time revealing new aspects of the situation. The Io myth itself, which explodes from the book the Woman reads before she falls asleep, is re-enacted within the repetitions of the basic action and penetrates them, so that myth and reality (if that's the word) become blurred.

It's a wonderful, rich conceit, beautifully realised in a production directed by Stephen Langridge, designed by Alison Chitty and lit by Paul Pyant, where the everyday activity is ritualistically downbeat, its tensions internalised, and it falls to the mythic interludes to reveal spontaneity of expression and action.

Birtwistle's early training was as a clarinettist, and he has scored The Io Passion for basset clarinet (with its extra low notes) and string quartet. Alan Hacker and the Diotima Quartet sustained its prevailing mood of dark lyricism with superb concentration, to create an absorbing atmosphere (subtly aided by the sound design of Sound Intermedia) in which, as with the lapping of water or the movement of leaves, things are ever the same yet ever different.

The contribution of the singers (Claire Booth, Amy Freston, Sam McElroy and Richard Morris) and actors (Teresa Banham and Joseph Alessi) was visually and vocally strong. But there were moments in which rather too many of sung words failed to communicate and others in which the presentation of what Birtwistle's has called "the point at which it becomes necessary to sing" seemed less than persuasive. Birtwistle, of course, is not a composer to leave an audience with easy answers. Yet at the end of a musically and theatrically fascinating evening, the resonance of the work seemed rather more muted than what had been suggested by so much of its ritualistically evocative action and music.

Other music by Birtwistle and his fellow soon-to-be-septuagenarian, Peter Maxwell Davies, is stranded throughout this year's Aldeburgh programme. The highlight of what I heard over the festival's first weekend was the early Tragoedia (the title means goat dance), given a raucously ballsy performance by the Composers Ensemble under Dominic Muldowney.

Aldeburgh artistic director Thomas Adès handed the reins over this year to guest director John Woolrich - Adès had his hands more than full writing, rehearsing and conducting his opera The Tempest. He's still featuring in the festival, however, and conducted the Britten Sinfonia in an all-English programme that was notable for the careful handling of the intertwined aesthetics of Tippett's Fantasia Concertante on a theme of Corelli and the pungent clashes of Britten's Suite on English Folk Tunes 'A time there was . . .

There's also a programming strand devoted to music for children, and the opening programme, from the Christ Church Cathedral Choir, Oxford, under Stephen Darlington brought a suavely stirring performance of Benjamin Britten's Missa Brevis for boys' voices and organ (Clive Driskill-Smith), serving as a reminder that there's probably no one in the 20th century who wrote for boys with as much illumination and insight as Britten.

A string quartet cycle of Bartók (all six of his quartets) and Haydn (the six quartets of Op 20) is being shared between the Vertavo and Belcea Quartets. The opening instalment showed the Vertavo's in imaginatively playful mood, taking on Haydn's Quartet in A, Op 20 No 6, from a period instruments' perspective, while the Belceas approached Bartók's First with an edge born of familiarity with the composer's later quartets.

The instrumental highlight of this year's opening concerts was, for me, French pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard's presentation of the sprawling fecundity of Ives's Concord Sonata. Aimard is a player who can clearly distinguish between wood and trees in Ives's complex and often glutted textures, to which he brought intellectual coherence, persuasive emotional thrust and an almost old-fashioned French sensibility in terms of piano tone. Rarely can the Concord Sonata have sounded so alluring.

The Aldeburgh Festival (0044 1728 687110) continues until June 26th. The Io Passion is at Aldeburgh today, at the Almeida Opera in London between July 1st and July 18th (0044 20 7359 4404), and at the Bregenz Festival in Austria on July 25th and 26th (0043 5574 407-6)