Between Worlds

English National Opera may be more in the news for its boardroom troubles at the moment, but on the stage it is still commissioning and producing bold and interesting new work from rising home-grown composers. The latest offering is from composer Tansy Davies, whose first foray into opera tackles one of the most pivotal events of our age: the attack on the World Trade Center in September 2001. The result is a musically superb meditation on grief and transcendence; though dramatically, the anonymity of the characters or any subplot beyond obvious victim responses, keeps the horror of 9/11 curiously distant.

Deborah Warner’s production, like Greek tragedy, shows us the responses to colossal events that we have not seen. Michael Levine’s set presents three levels of suspended floors – the outside world beneath, the protagonists trapped on an upper floor in the middle and, above, countertenor Andrew Watts sits brooding as the Shaman, incanting the darkness that is to come, the suffering and release. The back wall is cleverly built of sheets of paper containing farewell messages, which fall apart on the first impact, while Jean Kalman’s lighting effectively simulates an internal structure in crisis; the firemen’s torches cutting through the smoky rooms is very eerie.

The libretto by Nick Drake presents a handful of diverse characters who emerge from the chorus – a realtor too busy to say goodbye to her son properly before rushing off to this breakfast meeting; an older man who told his wife he would see a cardiologist, but is at work instead. They are a mixed bag of singers – the most affecting performances are from baritone Eric Greene as the janitor and mezzo Susan Bickley as a bereaved mother.

Gerry Cornelius, as ever, conducts electronics and chorus with ease. The key ingredient, however, is Davies’s music, which knits perfectly with jagged choral polyphony incanting the Requiem Mass and ‘De Profundis’ – reminiscent of Ligeti. It oozes confidence and creates a shifting, fragmented soundscape.