Violet – Photos & Reviews

Violet, my opera with Alice Birch, was premiered last Friday to open the Aldeburgh Festival, directed by Jude Christian – cast, creative team and technical team did such a beautiful job, and I’ve been blown away by the response. Below are a few extracts from reviews, and some images of the production. Set design is by Rosie Elnile, costume by Cécile Trémolières and lighting design by Jackie Shemesh. Photos are by Marc Brenner.

The opera will be broadcast on BBC Radio 3 on Saturday 18th June.

Fierce and funny, magical and precise, it’s a dazzling piece – the best new British opera we’ve seen for some time.

Which is all the more striking when you realise that it’s also a first for both Coult and Birch: his first opera score, her first libretto. Opera-making is a dark art. Great composers (Wagner, Beethoven) and great writers (Auden, Forster) have stumbled in early attempts, and it’s rare to see such complete assurance and alchemy between collaborators.

– Alexandra Coghlan, The Telegraph

Tom Coult’s darkly funny yet disturbing opera makes a significant splash at Aldeburgh…The result has been well worth waiting for…its momentum never flags…How do you finish an opera that deals with the end of time? Ultimately, it’s as good a conclusion as any to this highly accomplished and fascinating new work.

This strikingly brilliant work certainly represents the finest joint UK operatic debut since Martin Crimp and George Benjamin collaborated on Into the Little Hill in 2006.

– George Hall, The Stage

Soaring soprano lines for Violet, negotiated with fabulous poise by Anna Dennis, often over fragile, melting textures from the 14 players of the London Sinfonietta conducted by Andrew Gourlay, are contrasted with often blunt declamation for her husband, while the bells marking off time and the ticking of clocks are constant features of the wonderfully varied sounds he extracts from the ensemble, reinforced by electronics. There is real assurance about every gesture and texture, it’s tremendously accomplished; Coult clearly believes in the authenticity of what his opera is all about’

– Andrew Clements, The Guardian

The composer Tom Coult and the writer Alice Birch have ingeniously combined the idea of mass extinction with personal emancipation…This is conveyed by Birch in clipped half-sentences that Coult sets in a striking score. Superbly played by the London Sinfonietta conducted by Andrew Gourlay, it meshes quasi-tonality with detuned effects and extraordinary sonorities…Throughout you get an ominous feeling of tick-tocking time draining away…A harrowing night out, but gripping.

– Richard Morrison, The Times