STAGE WORKS

The Mysterious Mata Hari, in Dance

New York Times feature

Duration

c. 100 minutes

Instrumentation

– 2 Flutes (2nd doubling Piccolo)
– 2 Oboes (2nd doubling Cor Anglais)
– 2 Clarinets in B-flat (1st doubling E-flat Clarinet, 2nd doubling Bass Clarinet)
– Alto Saxophone
– 2 Bassoons (2nd doubling Contrabassoon)

– 4 Horns in F
– 3 Trumpets in C
– 2 Trombones
– Bass Trombome
– Tuba

– Timpani
– 3 Percussion (Sizzle Cymbal, Bass Drum, Glockenspiel, Tam-tam, Snare Drum, Suspended Cymbal, 3 Temple Blocks, 5 Tubular Bells, Tambourine, Goblet Drum, 2 Tom-toms, Xylophone, Clashed Cymbals, Temple Bowls, Marimba, Crotales, Vibraphone, Cabasa, Sizzle Cymbal, Whip, Triangle, Egg Shaker)

– Piano
– Celesta
– 2 Harps

– Strings (minimum: 10.10.8.6.4)
– Violin
– Viola
– Cello
– Double bass (optional with bass extension)

World premiere: February 6, 2016 Dutch National Opera & Ballet, Amsterdam, The Netherlands; a Dutch National Ballet production.

Choreographer: Ted Brandsen; Composer: Tarik O’Regan; Libretto: Janine Brogt; Stage and Lighting Design: Clement & Sanôu; Costume Design: François-Noël Cherpin; Orchestration: Tarik O'Regan and Anthony Weeden.

A Letter of Rights at Christ Church Cathedral

A review of the 2017 Irish premiere in GoldenPlec: "O’Regan’s setting is harmonically grounded, with the real beauty in the detail of the writing such as the delicate percussion or complex string textures. The work could scarcely receive a finer treatment than we hear tonight, and highlights the success in combining these two accomplished Irish ensembles."

Tarik O'Regan: A Letter of Rights

Classical Music Magazine interview with Tarik O'Regan

Celebrating Magna Carta in music

BBC News interview with Alice Goodman

Distant British Past Is Also Present for Salisbury

New York Times feature

Tarik O'Regan, composer

I was drawn to the idea of poise, something which came directly from Alice's libretto. By which I mean both the intricate way in which parchment was made in 1215 (and which Alice references in her text), but also the delicate nature of arriving at the wording which was written upon that parchment 800 year ago, and its subsequent interpretations. As a result, A Letter of Rights has a ritualistic quality to it: palindromic, divided into several text-driven movements interconnected by instrumental interludes for strings and percussion.

Alice Goodman, librettist

Amongst the treasures of Salisbury Cathedral is one of the finest of the few surviving copies of Magna Carta. To all intents and purposes it is a holy relic. It was the fact of the Cathedral’s possession of this copy of Magna Carta that motivated the Canon Chancellor to ask me to write something for this concert. So I began writing with a sense of the importance of the document itself, the piece of parchment to which King John fixed his seal. As I wrote, I discovered the paradoxes of the Great Charter; how quickly it was annulled, how little of it still matters to us, and yet how long and how powerful its continuing life has been, and how much we owe to it and rely upon it.

The title that I chose with Tarik O’Regan for our cantata, A Letter of Rights, comes from Directive 2012/13/EU of the European Parliament and of the Council of 22 May 2012 on the right to information in criminal proceedings. Persons arrested on suspicion of a crime must be given a letter of rights in a language they understand, a letter that they can hold and keep, read, and refer to. We are back to the thing itself. We open the glass case in which we’ve entombed Magna Carta. It comes up fresh and smelling of roses, newer than the latest news from the new government.

Synopsis

The cantata explores the text of clauses 39 and 40 (a right to due legal process) in the Great Charter of 1215: Magna Carta. The musical structure is formed of eight sections separated by short instrumental interludes, and is framed by a prelude and postlude. It is palindromic, with ‘The wording’ (Section 5) at its axis.

But something comes before the text, before the pen curves through the air to form the first capital. That is the ground on which the letter is set: the parchment. Since the making of parchment requires the shedding of blood, this is where we begin.

Duration

c. 40 minutes

Instrumentation

– Percussion (one player): Tubular bells (positioned offstage, as far from the orchestra and chorus as is practicably possible. Pitches required: D4, F4)/Crotales (two octaves)/Large orchestral bass drum
– SATB Chorus (from which are drawn Soloists in all voice parts and a Semichorus, which should be formed of approximately a quarter of the singers in the Chorus, with a minimum of two singers per part; the minimum number of singers in the Chorus is 16).
– Strings: there should be an equal number of players for Violin I, Violin II, Viola and Cello; 2.2.2.2.1 is the minimum number of players required (examples of larger forces might be 4.4.4.4.2 or 10.10.10.10.4); a low-C extension for the Double Basses is required by at least one player.

First performed on 13 June 2015, at Salisbury Cathedral, by Salisbury Cathedral Choir and La Folia (leader: Daphne Moody), directed by David Halls (Director of Music, Salisbury Cathedral).

O’Regan and Australian composer Nick Wales have worked a minor miracle by seamlessly fusing the a cappella original with new electronic music that frames, offsets and enhances to create something that they call Dance Score...I frequently found myself writing phrases like: “this is so beautiful” – and it is, again and again.
Limelight Magazine

Bonachela’s achieves that sublime experience when music, movement and design coming together in euphoric alchemy: the choreography and the score seem to describe each other perfectly, seem so perfectly enmeshed as an organic whole that it’s hard to imagine one without the other.
Time Out Sydney

An enticing half-hour dance score that deserves more than one hearing.
Sydney Morning Herald

Endlessly fascinating...undeniably thrilling.
Sydney Morning Herald

Everything heard in Louder Than Words emanates from the human voice: sung, spoken or electronically manipulated. We have responded to the idea of unrequited, or Petrarchan, love: where love is desired yet its rejection is painful. This is the double-edged sword heard as the music alternates between contrasting acoustic and electronic material.

The original three-movement acoustic vocal work, Scattered Rhymes, interlaces two fourteenth-century texts, which each toy with the ambiguities of intertwining two different types of love: the sensual and the divine. One text (in Latin) is by an anonymous English author, and the other (in medieval Italian) by Petrarch (1304–1374). It is an abstracted, fragmentary and ultimately Cubist work, revealing its image using different perspectives at the same time.

Introducing (and related to) each of these movements are three electronic sections. Furthering the Cubist idea, the driving force here is a sense of consciousness pushing through different dimensions, away from the canvas and into various sonic perspectives. The guttural bass sounds and persistent rave-like textures that permeate the electronic movements are reflections upon the darker, almost desperate elements of desire.

Thus there is a bifurcation throughout Louder Than Words: between acoustic and electronic; divine and primal; the heavens and the earthly; Latin and Italian. Or, as Petrarch put it:

I find no peace, and yet I make no war:
and fear, and hope: and burn, and I am ice:and fly above the sky, and fall to earth,
and clutch at nothing, and embrace the world.

The music accompanying Rafael Bonachela’s choreography (referred to here as Louder Than Words) started life as a 2006 stand-alone work called Scattered Rhymes by Tarik O’Regan. This 18 minute work in three movements for two choirs was commissioned by the Spitalfields Festival in London. A commercial recording on the Harmonia Mundi label by the Orlando Consort and the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir conducted by Paul Hillier was released in 2008. This recording was the catalyst for Louder Than Words.

In November 2013 Rafael and Tarik met in New York City, where they discussed the concept for a new dance piece based on Scattered Rhymes. In this new version, which ultimately became Louder Than Words, the three existing sections of Scattered Rhymes would be interspersed with three new electronic movements to be composed jointly by composer Nick Wales and Tarik.

Tarik and Nick met in Sydney in March 2013 to work on the electronic movements. Using only samples from the original 2008 CD of Scattered Rhymes and various recordings of people reading poetry, together they created rough mixes of the three newly commissioned electronic sections, which they have titled Fragmented Dimensions. Over the next few months, Nick honed the electronic tracks, working with Tarik and mix engineer Bob Scott, to seamlessly interpolate them into the three original Scattered Rhymes movements.

World premiere: October 4, 2014 Sydney Theatre, Sydney, Australia; a Sydney Dance Company production.

Choreographer: Rafael Bonachela; Composers: Tarik O’Regan and Nick Wales; Costume Design: Rafael Bonachela; Costume Design Realisation: Fiona Holley; Lighting and Stage Designer: Benjamin Cisterne; Original Cast: Juliette Barton, Thomas Bradley, Holly Doyle, Janessa Dufty, David Mack, Cass Mortimer Eipper, Fiona Jopp, Bernhard Knauer, Paul Knobloch, Alana Sargent, Jesse Scales, Todd Sutherland, Jessica Thompson, Petros Treklis, Charmene Yap, Sam Young-Wright.

Duration

c. 30 minutes

Musical Movements

1. Fragmented Dimensions I
2. Scattered Rhymes I
3. Fragmented Dimensions II
4. Scattered Rhymes II
5. Fragmented Dimensions III
6. Scattered Rhymes III

Music Credits

Scattered Rhymes I/II/III composed by Tarik O’Regan (recording by Orlando Consort, Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir, conducted by Paul Hillier: Harmonia Mundi USA HMU807469). Copyright © 2006 Music Sales Classical. Fragmented Dimensions I/II/III composed by Nick Wales and Tarik O’Regan, using samples from Scattered Rhymes (recording mixed by Bob Scott). Copyright © 2014 Nick Wales/Music Sales Classical

The “wonderful European premiere” (Time Out London) of O’Regan’s monodrama The Wanton Sublime in a new production by Robert Shaw for Inside Intelligence has opened to a series of positive reviews: O’Regan’s music is “rather wonderful, weaving a richly melismatic vocal line into a strikingly coloured orchestral score delicately enhanced by electronic effects; never sterile or mechanical, it [had] a living organic pulse” (Telegraph). An “inventive and attractive score” (Evening Standard) “rooted in strings, but regularly pricked with electric guitars, flute doubling piccolo, and the stardust of percussion” (Spectator) provides for “vital, compelling music” (WhatsOnStage) to create a “strikingly immersive experience” (The Stage) of “bluesy rebelliousness and Monteverdian lyricism” (Guardian).
Selections from reviews of the UK production (August 25-29, 2015)

The Wanton Sublime and The Companion were not only grippingly entertaining but proved that the small opera is gaining ground as a viable and truly accessible genre in itself. Well-directed, tightly composed, intensely acted, and precisely staged, these diminutive creations left nothing behind and didn't induce nostalgia for a massive opera.
Seen & Heard International: Daniele Sahr (May 29, 2014)

The Tarik O'Regan score to The Wanton Sublime is sophisticated, lyrical, and fascinating – very well-executed music that can stand on its own, although it supports the libretto.
Soundwordsight: Mark Greenfest (May 11, 2014)

This impressive one-woman show (The Wanton Sublime) was strongly supported by a fragmented, but nevertheless focused, score [which] powerfully highlighted Mary's dual persona with, among other catchy musical accompaniments, the assertiveness of percussion and the sweetness of the violin. This was an unusual, fascinating and touching musical portrait.
Classical Music Rocks (April 26, 2014)

O’Regan and Rabinowitz’s The Wanton Sublime and Paterson and Cote’s The Companion offered up further thoughtful perspectives on the shape of things to come as opera continues to search for its place in the developing musical landscape. As long as composers and librettists continue to explore ways of expressing themselves through this medium, the strong potential for great and memorable works to continue to emerge remains high.
I Care If You Listen: Christian Kriegeskotte (May 22, 2014)

...a fluid, enticing score. Dividing the score into sections is the drone of a cello and bass, from which other sounds, erratic and mellifluous, germinated. O'Regan's vocal lines transform the asymmetric rhythms of Rabinowitz's text into compelling and theatrical music.
Opera News: Steve Jude Tietjen (July, 2014)

The music for The Wanton Sublime highlights the interplay, as found in Anna Rabinowitz’s libretto, between the iconic image of Mary and her physical being. The instrumentation of the amplified ensemble gives weight to this bifurcation: at times it is light and celestial, and on other occasions heavy and of the earth. The voice of Mary, although sometimes fragmented and layered, inhabits the territory in between. This musical drama is played out in mosaic form, with small glimpses of thematic ideas repeated and combined in differing combinations throughout the work. The overall image, formed from various permutations of the protagonist's myriad fleeting, juxtaposed thoughts and utterances, is only seen from a distance.

“What does it mean to be chosen?" The Wanton Sublime, a 2014 commission from Tarik O'Regan and Anna Rabinowitz, explores the human and mythic aspects of the Virgin Mary. In this one-act monodrama for mezzo-soprano and amplified chamber ensemble, Mary struggles to retain her flesh and blood identity in the face of external forces intent on symbolizing her as the ideal woman.

Duration

c. 30 minutes

Instrumentation

– Mezzo-soprano
– Pre-recorded mezzo soprano

– Flute (doubling Piccolo)
– Percussion (two players, sharing: small drum kit [consisting of bass drum, snare drum, hi-hat, ride cymbal, crash cymbal]/tam-tam/crotales [two octaves]/marimba/vibraphone/glockenspiel/two goblet drums/tubular bells [two pitches needed: C-sharp and E above Middle C]/sizzle cymbal/large suspended cymbal/zills/cabasa)
– Acoustic guitar (doubling Electric guitar)
– Electric guitar (doubling four-string Electric bass guitar)

– Violin
– Viola
– Cello
– Double bass (optional with bass extension)

An American Opera Projects/American Modern Ensemble co-production, presented by Ear Heart Music at Roulette, Brooklyn on April 22, 2014.

Conductor: Tyson Deaton; Director: Mallory Catlett; Lighting Designer: Jeanette Yew; Sound Designer: Charles Hagaman; Cast: Hai-Ting Chinn; Orchestra: American Modern Ensemble.

The brilliance of Tarik O'Regan and Tom Phillips's new chamber opera lies in its ability to convey all that horror without the compulsion to show it - the ultimate psychodrama - and to employ music of startling beauty to tell such a brutal tale [...] Underpinning all this is a score of concise originality. Restless, leaping woodwind propel the narrative through the murky waters of the Congo, while interesting combinations of sonorities - double bass and classical guitar, for instance - trickle and bubble through the music. Just 14 instrumentalists keep the singers afloat on this quirkily beautiful raft, expertly steered by conductor Oliver Gooch.
The Observer

For my money, O'Regan is one of the great hopes for British music in the 21st century. I've been engaged, excited and entranced by his development [...] and this piece - his biggest undertaking to date - is obviously a landmark. With a libretto by the polymath artist/writer/genial giant Tom Phillips, it turned out to be a viable score that holds attention, sustains pace, and draws your ear into a magical and haunting sound-world, frequently sustained by a symphonic kind of writing for the voices - all of which places it head and shoulders among the vast majority of new music-theatre pieces that come along these days.
The Telegraph

Tarik O'Regan's Conrad adaptation is an audacious, handsome debut [...] The craftsmanship of this first opera is indubitable, the horror muted by curatorial delicacy.
The Independent On Sunday

'Heart of Darkness' is very good. If you think of opera as an often bloated, over-wrought art form with hammy plots and acting, you would do well to try this one. It is elegant, moving, and, at just 75 minutes, short enough to allow time for dinner afterward.
The Wall Street Journal

The most striking achievement of Tarik O’Regan’s new work at Covent Garden’s Linbury Studio is to transform [the novel] into a compellingly taut evening of music theatre. O’Regan’s ... pacing is secure and varied – he avoids the meandering parlando of so much new opera.
Sunday Telegraph

This neat production, mounted by Opera East and ROH2, has no time to babble. Floridly lyrical, instrumentalists from the spunky ensemble Chroma brightly chatter, especially winds, harp and celesta [...] in the music’s clarity and harmonic sting. Worth seeing [...] and it’s short.
Times

The orchestral writing is richly coloured and imaginative. [Kurtz's] manic aria, inexorably repeating the single ironic phrase 'I am glad’, has a charged intensity [...] O'Regan should be given another commission.
Telegraph

At around 75 minutes, the result is swift and well paced, with no individual scene lasting longer than it should. The opera demonstrates O'Regan's wide range of technical skills. The vocal writing is skilful and effective.
Guardian

The sound-worlds [O'Regan] conjures up with the Chroma Orchestra's percussion, woodwind, strings, harp, and celeste are very beguiling.
Independent

Fluidly conversational while suggestive of the ambivalences and dark enigmas that underlie the story.
Evening Standard

O’Regan and Phillips have created an atmospheric psychological drama. Reflecting O’Regan’s transatlantic existence, his score references the anguished coiled chromatic vocal phrases of Benjamin Britten and the clean metrics of American minimalism, as well as including an exuberant dance to celebrate the arrival of vital, ship-repair-enabling rivets.
The Stage

Careful not to bite off more than he could chew, operatic first-timer Tarik O'Regan focused his efforts on a chamber adaptation of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness and its sell-out run at the Linbury Theatre (in a co-production with pioneering Opera East) more than made up for any lack of scandal. Charting a captain's journey into the nadir of colonialism, O'Regan's [...] burst out of the chamber opera confines and within 75 minutes O’Regan and librettist Tom Phillips told a vivid tug-of-war between society and despair. There's surely further operatic gold waiting for O'Regan.
Classical Music Magazine

This is a thrilling new work, in a brilliantly realised production. I hope I get the opportunity to see it again soon [...] The handling of form and pace is superb. Marlow’s journey is swift but the composer allows for moments of repose and reflection, effortlessly and almost imperceptibly altering tempo and metre, register and colour.
Opera Today

...this is a terrific new work, intelligently staged and magnificently performed [...] Taken as a whole, Heart of Darkness has more going for it that many new operas, and I left the auditorium longing to hear it again - preferably immediately, certainly soon. The tour mooted for 2012 cannot happen quickly enough.
ClassicalSource

A well-crafted, well-executed work, which, whatever the future may hold, permits of not only a satisfying but at times moving evening in the theatre. How refreshing it was, then, to experience a work and production that spoke of true collaboration.
Seen and Heard International

Tarik O'Regan's first step into operatic waters [is] fat-free and tautly structured [and] makes for a gripping 75 minutes. There aren't many tickets left, but do grab one if you can – and a spare for your friend who doesn't really like opera. This is the sort of production that might just change their mind.
Intermezzo

[With] wonderful orchestral touches [...] O’Regan has perfected the art of allowing the ensemble to function as a giant percussive instrument in choppier moments of tension. Overall Philips and O’Regan’s Heart of Darkness treats a sinister and multi-layered subject with imagination and artistic flair and the small cast impressive [...] as thought-provoking and successful as any adaption of Conrad’s symbolic frame-narrative can be.
Bachtrack

Heart of Darkness managed what a lot of contemporary opera does not care about, emotion. The woven textures of the score and the beautiful singing by the dedicated cast was a joy to listen to, but more importantly an emotional experience, like the best of opera it touched the audience.
OperaCreep/George's Musings

O’Regan’s first opera (he is only 33) is a mature representation of a difficult theme, which is both engaging and disturbing, though never dull.
Show Me Something Interesting/James Edward Hughes 

Wow! This was a remarkable achievement by 33 year old composer Tarik O’Regan, along with a libretto by artist Tom Phillips. They have packed Joseph Conrad’s novella into 75 minutes of gripping musical narrative [...] nothing is hurried, everything is accomplished.
Mark Ronan's Theatre Reviews

It is a struggle that this opera reflects well, leaving the audience, like Marlow’s audience, contemplating a complex and enigmatically revealing vision.
The Joseph Conrad Society

The contemporary relevance of Conrad's timeless tale needs no underlining. Many writers and thinkers have interpreted Conrad's masterpiece with diverging, or even contradictory, results: from Chinua Achebe's charge of outright racism, to Adam Hochschild's belief that the work is a form of anti-imperial non-fiction.

Our goal in making an opera has been to distil Conrad's dense narrative, in which navigation is both a practical part of the tale - a journey by boat on a river in an unnamed country in Central Africa - and a metaphor for telling, or indeed not telling, the truth of his experiences on this voyage. This double 'navigation' is central to the opera's drama.

In this respect, musically and in the libretto, we have tried to reflect Conrad's split-frame narrative: Marlow is seen to be in two places simultaneously (London as an old seafarer and Central Africa as a young steamboat captain), both psychologically and empathetically.

It is Marlow who reveals his own younger self's lie. We see him both as liberator and abductor of the truth. This resonates with Edward Said's understanding of the conflict within the author himself: "As a creature of his time, Conrad could not grant the natives their freedom, despite his severe critique of the imperialism that enslaved them."

Our aim is that Marlow's tale on stage becomes a form of psychodrama: what he has to say in London as an old man in some way begins to exorcise his inaction as a young man following his expedition to Africa.

By associating the London narrative with faster-moving recitative, the scenes which take place away from the Thames are allowed to ebb and flow more freely. The recitative sections use a specific orchestration, influenced by the resonance of Hugh Tracey's ethnographical recordings from the Belgian Congo in the 1950s, here represented by harp, celesta, guitar and percussion.

The libretto restricts itself entirely to words from Conrad's novel with limited use of the author's own navigational diaries of a Congo expedition (the so-called Congo Diary of 13 June - 4 August 1890 and the Up-river Book of 1-19 August 1890).

As in the case of the brilliantly stripped down radio version of Heart of Darkness that Orson Welles made in 1938 for the Mercury Theatre of the Air, necessary economy has provoked changes of structure. The requirements of operatic form have led to an even greater conflation of dramatic roles to match the telescoping of the narrative.

The greatest encouragement (and challenge) has been from Conrad himself who, in a preface to the work written in 1917, described it in directly musical terms: "...like another art altogether. That sombre theme had to be given a sinister resonance, a tonality of its own, a continued vibration that, I hoped, would hang in the air and dwell on the ear after the last note had been struck."

The opera opens with two snapshots: first Marlow, an old sea-captain, in a moment of recollection; next, a fragment of a mysterious encounter many years earlier, whose meaning only becomes clear at the end. The action takes place concurrently on a ship, moored in the Thames Estuary, and, many years earlier, during Marlow's expedition to Central Africa.

Marlow is among a small group of passengers aboard a ship moored in the Thames one evening, waiting for the tide to come in. He starts to relate the tale of his travels as a young man, when he sailed upriver in the equatorial forest of an unnamed country in Central Africa (which closely resembles the Congo Free State, a large area in Central Africa controlled by King Leopold II of Belgium from 1885-1908).

He has been sent there to find Kurtz, the enigmatic and once idealistic ivory trader rumoured to have turned his remote Inner Station into a barbaric fiefdom. Marlow's journey starts in the Company's offices in Europe, where he is given his instructions and a perfunctory medical check, before he departs for Africa.

He arrives first at the Downriver Station and encounters the Accountant who first mentions Kurtz. Marlow then comes to the Central Trading Station where he meets the Manager who will accompany him on the voyage. The expedition is delayed because the steamboat on which they will sail is damaged. Waiting for vital spare parts to arrive, Marlow befriends the boilermaker, who sheds more light on Kurtz.

Marlow finds a cryptic note dropped by the Manager, which hints at Kurtz's instability. The missing rivets arrive and the boat is fixed. The voyage progresses briskly, despite being attacked by unknown assailants. Eventually Marlow and his entourage arrive at the Inner Station, where Kurtz is based, together with his peculiar acolyte, the Harlequin. The Manager finds Kurtz's enormous hoard of ivory which he hurriedly carries onboard the boat.

At last Kurz appears. He is gaunt, thin and ill. He has a letter to give Marlow. A mysterious River Woman sings a lament.

The Harlequin reveals that it was Kurtz who ordered the attack on Marlow's steamboat. Marlow and Kurtz speak for the first time. Marlow sees Kurtz is on the edge of madness. He must be taken back downriver. On board the steamboat Kurtz becomes delirious, reflecting incoherently on his imperious ideas and deeds as the boat sails away from the Inner Station. Eventually Kurtz dies, uttering "The horror! The horror!"

We now witness in full the fragment of conversation seen at the start: back in London, Marlow meets Kurtz's fiancée to pass her the letter that Kurtz had entrusted to him. Despite all that he has seen and understood, Marlow is unable to bear witness to the truth. He is unable to tell her Kurtz's final words. We in turn see that Marlow himself has played his part in maintaining the secrecies of horror he finds so abhorrent.

Back on the Thames Estuary, the tide has risen. Marlow's tale is at an end. His isolation from the truth of his actions and the atrocities witnessed - that "vast grave of unspeakable secrets" in which he speaks of being "buried" - is borne out in his epilogue: "we live, as we dream, alone".

Duration

c. 75 minutes

Characters

MARLOW (tenor): an old seafarer who tells of his early employ as the captain of a steamboat on an expedition to Central Africa
THE THAMES CAPTAIN (baritone): a captain of a ship moored in the Thames Estuary, and witness to Marlow’s tale
THE COMPANY SECRETARY (tenor): based at the Company’s headquarters in Europe
THE DOCTOR (baritone): also based at the Company’s headquarters
THE ACCOUNTANT (tenor): the Company’s chief accountant, based at an outer trading station
THE MANAGER (tenor): a Company manager, in charge of Marlow’s expedition
THE BOILERMAKER (baritone): based at the central trading station
THE HELMSMAN (tenor): on Marlow’s steamboat
KURTZ (bass): an ivory trader
THE HARLEQUIN (tenor): in Kurtz’s entourage
THE RIVER WOMAN (soprano): also in Kurtz’s entourage
THE FIANCÉE (soprano): Kurtz’s fiancée in Europe

Casting Note (8-12 Singers)

It is possible to double-cast several of the characters, allowing the opera to be performed with as few as eight singers. A combination of both single- and double-casting is also possible. Character doublings are: The Company Secretary and The Manager (tenor); The Doctor and The Boilermaker (baritone); The Accountant and The Helmsman (tenor); The River Woman and The Fiancée (soprano).

Orchestration (14 Instruments)

– Flute, doubling Piccolo and Alto Flute
– Clarinet 1 in B-flat, doubling E-flat Clarinet and Bass Clarinet
– Clarinet 2 in B-flat, doubling Bass Clarinet
– French Horn
– Percussion (1 player): Vibraphone, Tubular Bells (range C-sharp 4 - D-sharp 5), Glockenspiel, Crotales (2-octave set from C), Tambourine, Triangle, Sizzle Cymbal, Large Suspended Cymbal, Large Tam-Tam, Snare Drum, Goblet Drum, 4 Tom-Toms, Bass Drum
– Harp
– Acoustic Guitar, with clean amplification, doubling Electric Bass Guitar
– Piano, doubling Celesta, Harpsichord and Chamber Organ (Acoustic instruments should be used wherever possible. If this proves difficult, high quality digital alternatives - e.g. Roland C-30 or C-80 - may be used.)
– 2 Violins
– Viola
– 2 Cellos
– Double Bass, with low C extension

World premiere: November 1, 2011 Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, Linbury Studio Theatre; an ROH2/OPERA EAST co-production; developed by American Opera Projects and OperaGenesis.

Conductor: Oliver Gooch; Director: Edward Dick; Designer: Robert Innes Hopkins; Lighting Designer: Rick Fisher; Associate Director: Jane Gibson; Orchestra: CHROMA; Cast: Alan Oke, Njabulo Madlala, Sipho Fubesi, Donald Maxwell, Paul Hopwood, Morten Larssenius Kramp, Jaewoo Kim, Gweneth-Ann Jeffers.

Extraordinary beauty: so strongly tonal that the use of dissonance in it can be as stunning, sometimes, as Josquin DesPrez or Carlo Gesualdo. A hugely unusual success.
Buffalo News

Young composer Tarik O’Regan’s star is now rising at such a velocity that to describe him as “up and coming” feels decidedly passé. His compositional style, a captivating extension of the English choral tradition, coloured by American minimalism and set within a largely tonal and modal harmonic language, has the quality of being both accessible to the masses and complex enough for the cognoscenti. O’Regan’s major new choral work, Acallam na Senórach / An Irish Colloquy is a setting of one of the longest-surviving works of medieval literature. O’Regan’s beautifully conceived and striking work presents six of these short stories over the course of 60 minutes. His forces are comparatively small – a 16-strong choir singing in English and Middle Irish, a solo guitar, and two bodhráin (traditional Irish frame drum) parts. However, the resultant sound is rich indeed. Sometimes exhilarating, always atmospheric, the work demonstrates O’Regan’s natural feel for the voice, his deftly multi-textured part-writing, and his strong rhythms. Aside from the sheer quality of their overall sound, there’s a lovely sense of intimacy and wonder-filled narration. All told, this is yet another beautiful Tarik O’Regan disc for Harmonia Mundi.BBC Music

Threshold of Night marked O’Regan’s coming of age in terms of international recognition, garnering him two Grammy nominations. The 33-year-old Brit has established himself as one of the premier young composers today, with over 90 compositions and over 20 recordings. You can’t ask for much more than that at his age. Acallam na Senórach (The Colloquy of the Ancients) is Ireland’s most famous and perhaps longest narrative going back to the 12th century. In this reduction there are only a few tales related, the chorus covering all parts, while a sketched outline of the whole is maintained. A guitar is used to represent Cas Corach, the musician of the underworld, and the integrity of the story in marvelously scattered among chorus and guitar. This was an easy hour to spend, and I was engrossed the entire time, spending much of it enjoying Harmonia mundi’s usual high production values and excellent booklet. The surround sound is well-nigh perfect. Enthusiastically recommended!
Audiophile Audition

The music avoids cliché yet still evokes a palpable sense of ancient history and obscure rites. O’Regan achieves this through incredible economy of means. It is a highly effective and, in places, inspired piece, beautifully delivered by Paul Hillier and the National Chamber of Ireland.Gramophone Magazine

Tarik O’Regan leads a generation of new choral composers whose music shows that originality need not be radical – nor upend the medium being inhabited. His recently premiered opera Heart of Darkness aside, O’Regan is heard in his most ambitious project yet, a musicalization of the medieval Irish epic Acallam na Senórach. O’Regan writes some of his best music here, walking a fine line among traditional chant, popular ballad, and a kind of 21st-century imagination that comes from a millennia-long overview of what has come before. At its best, the music is highly visceral. At its very best, the piece enters previously unheard sound worlds, with astonishing effect.Philadelphia Inquirer

The Text

Acallam na Senórach, a Middle Irish narrative dating to the late 12^th or early 13^th century, translates to English as ‘The Colloquy of the Ancients’ or ‘Dialogue of the Elders’. It is one of the most important texts to survive from that period and is one of the longest surviving works of original medieval Irish literature. The original text tells the story of St Patrick’s interactions with two of the last-surviving members of a fían (band of warriors) once led by Finn mac Cumaill: Caílte and Oisín. They are still alive centuries after the famed battles in which they fought (traditionally assigned to the third century) and no explanation is given as to why they are still roaming Ireland, with their followers, at the time of St Patrick’s arrival in the fifth century. The conversation between the saint and Caílte (who takes a significantly larger role in the dialogue than Oisín), as they journey around Ireland, provides a frame in which are embedded approximately 200 shorter narratives describing incidents in the era of Finn and his fían. Acallam na Senórach survives in five manuscripts, which date from the 15th and 16th centuries: two in the Franciscan Collection at University College Dublin, two in the University of Oxford and one in Chatsworth House.

The Music

In writing this musical setting of Acallam na Senórach I was drawn to the evenness of the dialogue. Instead of St Patrick simply converting the pagan warriors, he is encouraged to listen to Caílte’s stories and poems of an earlier time, in which the saint delights. This secular/sacred osmosis is maintained unwaveringly throughout the entire text. By the end of the narrative, one has witnessed not only the arrival of a new religion in Ireland, but also a richly-recounted secular narrative map of the entire island: the peaceful and enriching shaking of two great hands. In preparing the libretto (the sung text), I have focused on only a few of the shorter constituent tales. This decision was born of the practical constraints of duration. I have, however, kept the skeleton, albeit smaller, of the overall frame in place. Finally, for the sake of simplicity, Oisín is removed from the primary narrative. The characters are not assigned specific voices. The narrative as a whole is carried by a persistently changing combination of voices and guitar. The one exception is Cas Corach, the musician of the síd (underworld) who is most closely embodied, throughout this setting, in the solo interludes for guitar. The music itself is not ethnographically inclined; that is, I have not attempted to reconstruct theories on Irish music of the period from which Acallam stems. However the score generally, and especially in the guitar writing (the editing of which was by Stewart French, who performed the guitar solo for the premiere) is imbued with an air of Arab and Persian influence. The dulcimer, which Cas Corach plays, is thought to have been similar to the Iranian Santur. A potential antecedent of the bodhráin (Irish frame drum), for which I have written two parts in this work, is the North African bendir. Considering that the surviving manuscripts of the Acallam stem from a period in which Ireland maintained some contact with North Africa and the Near East, both of a friendly (trade) and hostile (piracy) nature, perhaps some variety of cultural exchange (not dissimilar to that between St Patrick and Caílte) influenced the extant transcriptions. Acallam, after all, tells us that, following his baptism by the saint, Caílte repays Patrick with a block of gold from the ‘Land of Arabia’. This is, no doubt, a reference to the Holy Land (from a different era altogether). For me, however, that precise moment, where continents, cultures, material goods and spiritual blessing intersect evenly, is the kernel of the entire work and, from my first reading of the text, served as the catalyst for this musical rendering.

First performed on 25 November 2010, at St Ann’s Church, Dublin, by Chamber Choir Ireland with Stewart French (guitar), directed by Paul Hillier.

Duration

c. 60 minutes

Recording

Acallam na Senórach: An Irish Colloquy, Chamber Choir Ireland, Stewar French (guitar), conducted by Paul Hillier: Harmonia Mundi USA HMU807486. Copyright © 2010 Music Sales Classical.