Gustav Holst's Savitri is one of the high points of English opera, a compact, economical piece of music theatre that is right up there with Purcell's Dido and Aeneas. It deserves to be seen and heard far more often than it is. Although it seems unlikely, the work combines a story taken from the Hindu Mahabharata and a score inflected with the cadences of English folk music. The 40-minute drama does not waste a word or a musical gesture; Holst's pared-down style employs a delicate web of instrumental colours and sparely expressive vocal lines.
Savitri was the climax of the Aldeburgh festival's triple bill at the Snape Maltings on Thursday, but the only one of the three works involved to be more or less fully staged. The basic (and basically unremarkable) production by Lindy Hume was played around a sumptuous backdrop by Howard Hodgkin, which had been specially flown over from the Smithsonian Institute in Washington for this one-off performance. But there was nothing intrinsically theatrical about the rest of the programme at all. The dramatic packaging applied to Britten's late cantata Phaedra was negligible (the protagonist threw herself around a bit, a handsomely veneered wall was wheeled squeakily around the stage), and that for Jonathan Harvey's Songs of Li-Po non-existent.
Harvey's three settings of texts by the famously bibulous Chinese poet (also one of the sources for Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde too) were an Aldeburgh commission, set for mezzo, strings, percussion and harpsichord. Over the course of 10 minutes they progressed from the hyperactivity of a waterfall, evoked by a manic violin solo, via the tintinnabulations of monastery bells, to the contemplative stasis of a mountain. It was a lucid journey, expressed in cool, clean vocal lines, but the piece never landed on any memorable musical images.
Binding Harvey, Britten and Holst together was the carefully graded conducting of Pierre-André Valade, the neat playing of the Northern Sinfonia, and the singing of the mezzo-soprano Sarah Connolly. She was direct and persuasive in the Songs, even toned but lacking in real passion as Phaedra, and eloquent, yet virtually wordless, in the title role of Savitri. Diction is always difficult in the Maltings, but the bass Stephen Richardson as Death, and the tenor Peter Wedd as Savitri's husband Satyavan got much more text across than Connolly did.
