Recording of the Week, Olga Neuwirth's Orlando

‘You can’t bring together all these heterogenous elements! It’s too complicated – you need to simplify!’. I’ll wager that these sentiments (voiced from on high by Orlando’s curmudgeonly male publisher partway through the second half of Olga Neuwirth’s Virginia Woolf-inspired opera) were levelled at the composer herself at some point during the genesis of this extraordinary work, yet the strange beauty and power of Neuwirth’s ‘fictional musical biography in nineteen scenes’ lies precisely in its audacious diversity – sonic and otherwise – and its unbridled glee in challenging status quos of various kinds.

Staged at the Vienna State Opera in 2019, Orlando generated a fair amount of media attention as the first house commission from a female composer (and indeed the first full-length opera by a woman to appear on the theatre’s main stage). Woolf’s 1928 novel about an Elizabethan nobleman who awakes one day to find himself in a female body and goes on to live a gender-fluid existence across three centuries provides Neuwirth with a framework to explore boundaries of almost every possible variety, blurring the lines between sound, speech and music, stage and screen, and above all musical styles: the score draws on influences as disparate as Renaissance polyphony, Stravinsky-esque neo-Classicism, protest-song and punk, and does so with a dizzying sleight-of-hand that’s hard to resist.

Neuwirth and her co-librettist Catherine Filloux also expand the already ambitious scope of Woolf’s time-travelling novel to bring us up to the present day, with the second half of the opera taking in World War Two, the Swinging Sixties, the advent of the digital age, and contemporary anxieties around LGBTQ rights, the rising cost of living, and the resurgence of fascism.

That the rich tapestry hangs together so well is due in no small part to the blazing star of this most eclectic of shows. American mezzo Kate Lindsey is nothing short of astonishing in the shape-shifting title-role, embracing Neuwirth’s kaleidoscope of musical language with fierce commitment. (It’s not every singer who can slip effortlessly between Dowland-esque lute-song, Handelian rage-aria, cabaret torch-song and glam rock in the space of a single evening, but Lindsey covers herself in glory). Physically, too, she’s a natural chameleon: thanks to her long experience of singing trouser-roles like Handel and Monteverdi’s Neros and Strauss’s Composer and Octavian, she’s convincingly masculine in Orlando’s first incarnation as Renaissance roisterer, and conveys the character’s subsequent dysphoria in the female body that’s foisted on him with sensitivity.

Every member of the enormous cast matches Lindsey’s dedication and energy to the hilt, with a particularly striking performance from Leigh Melrose, unrecognisable in prosthetics and giving Upstart Crow’s Mark Heap a run for his dirty money as the oleaginous poet-publisher Greene. Other stand-outs include coloratura soprano Constance Hauman as an imposing, unromanticised Elizabeth I, and gender-fluid cabaret star Justin Vivian Bond, who not so much tears up the rule-book as sets it on fire as Orlando’s Child (a role interpolated by Neumann and Filloux).

So does Neuwirth ‘need to simplify’? Well, perhaps just a little: the dramatic momentum begins to flag once we move beyond the scope of Woolf’s novel, when the numerous spoken monologues on identity-politics start to feel like a series of TED Talks rather than something fully integrated into the score. But one has to salute Neuwirth’s conviction and invention, and there’s plenty here to ravish eyes and ears alike as well as much to provoke and stimulate on an intellectual level.

There’s a telling moment in the second half of the opera where the omnipresent narrator meditates on whether longevity is a useful metric for the success of a work of art, and at present the future of the piece looks uncertain: with its huge cast and instrumental forces (not to mention the eye-watering production-costs for a show where spectacle and costume are so integral), it’s not a work to tackle on a budget, and as opera-houses struggle with the after-effects of lockdowns there are no revivals in the pipeline. All the more reason, then, to catch it on DVD or Blu-ray – the production transfers brilliantly to the screen, and anyone with even a passing interest in contemporary opera and/or gender identity will find much nourishing food for thought here.