It seems surprising that Wagner's music – with its audacious harmonies and outrageous invocations of cultural identity – hasn't been exploited by more jazz musicians. And British pianist and composer Julian Joseph is ideally placed to provide the jazz component in Stephen Fry's Wagner festival: not only has he combined a successful jazz career with several heavyweight classical recitals, but he has already written two fully staged operas. This reimagining of Tristan and Isolde, however, is announced as a "work in progress", comprising fragments of five scenes from a projected opera.
Joseph and his librettist, Professor Mike Phillips, have taken the folk myth of an Irish princess and a Breton nobleman and recast it as a pan-European 21st-century tale. The two protagonists are half-African students who grew up on the borders of Hungary and Romania, and the regal families of the original story have been replaced by businessmen and gangsters. Where Wagner's opera is an overblown erotic psychodrama – a passion of orgasmic transcendence – this production points towards a more scholarly examination of culture, identity and hybridisation.
The libretto seems a little overwritten and it isn't always audible – R&B star Carleen Anderson, as Isolde, delivers her lines in a smoky register that sounds terrific but is almost unintelligible. The music premiered tonight, though, was of a very high quality. Joseph started the evening with a short improvisation based on the infamous "Tristan chord", and some of his arias use Wagnerian harmonies – those twisting, convoluted chord sequences that remain agonisingly unresolved. There are some fine performances from his sextet, particularly saxophonist Shabaka Hutchings and trumpeter Russell Bennett; while vocalists Cleveland Watkiss (as Vasile) and Christine Tobin (as Iuliana and Brigid) are tremendous. And an unexpected find is Ken Papenfus from the underachieving Northern Irish rock band Relish, whose Sting-like tenor howl is a perfect fit for Tristan. If it's something of a mess, it's an enjoyable and fascinating one. I'm looking forward to seeing how it develops.
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