The main event of the London Sinfonietta's concert was the UK premiere of Hagoromo, a one-act opera by Japanese composer Jo Kondo. Conductor Paul Zukofsky designed the whole programme around this piece, making connections between Kondo's reflective style and the influence of eastern music on other composers.
In Percy Grainger's brilliantly imaginative arrangement of Debussy's Pagodes, the solo piano miniature is transformed into a showpiece for a 20-piece gamelan of tuned percussion. Debussy's original was inspired by Javanese music, so Grainger's arrangement restores the music to its source. But the result sounds neither like traditional gamelan nor Debussy. Instead, the piece is strange, exotic, and uniquely Grainger.
Kondo's music is itself a meeting of east and west. The soloists in Hagoromo are a narrator, mezzo-soprano and dancer, and the opera is based on a Noh play by Zeami. A fisherman finds a cloak of feathers in a tree. The cloak belongs to an angel, and to thank him for returning it to the heavens, the angel performs a dance for mankind. Everything about Hagoromo is distanced from conventional western theatre. There is little drama in the story, while Kondo's setting is static and repetitive. The narrator and singer play both parts (in Japanese), and there is little or no development of character or musical material.
Even with an introduction in English, there was something impenetrable about the work. The music, words and action all inhabit a world of mysterious ritual. The score is a slow-moving tapestry of sounds, made from repeated collections of chords and textures. It has an ambitious austerity, but little of the spiritual transcendence signalled by the angel's role in the story. In fact, the relationship between Alyssa Dodson's angelic dancing, Teresa Shaw's singing and Tomoko Shiota's narration was deliberately obscure. Yet there were moments of clarity, particularly at the end of the piece, when the solo flute was engulfed by string chords, mirroring the play's final image of Mount Fuji disappearing into the mist. Zukofsky led the Sinfonietta in a sympathetic performance, but Hagoromo remained an elusive piece of music theatre.
