London, Royal Opera House, Covent Garden: Lorin Maazel's ‘1984’

Extract

I have had occasion to be sniffy about Lorin Maazel's music in these pages before (Tempo No. 218), not least because of its sheer lack of profile, of any hint of individuality. So it was with exceedingly modest expectations that I took my seat for his first opera, 1984, the world-première run of which began on 3 May. Even so, I was disappointed: no ditchwater is as dull. The basic problem is the absence of any discernible personality in what Maazel writes: the musical language of1984 is a thin gruel boiled up from left-over Prokofiev, Copland, Bartók, Ravel, Janáček, whatever was lying around the mid-20th-century chopping-board of Maazel's memory as he put the piece together. Add a secondary deficit: there's absolutely no sense of dramatic tension – the work unfolds at the same plodding pace throughout. Now sprinkle with the kind of mistakes you might expect from a rookie operatic composer. The opening ‘Hate’ chorus, for example, revealed instantly what was going to be a recurrent difficulty: the scoring and an over-ambitious tempo combine to make the sung text difficult to understand. Maazel repeatedly doubles vocal lines in the orchestra, sacrificing their clarity.