Summary
COMPOSER Stephen McNeff and librettist David Wood intend Clockwork as an opera "for everyone aged eight plus", but they do not make it easy for their audience. The piece lasts around 100 minutes, which is pushing towards the upper limit even for a "grownup" modern opera; and there are as many as five plot strands wrapped up in a tight narrative bundle. No wonder the programme's synopsis requires two pages of densely packed text.
McNeff and Wood derive Clockwork from Philip Pullman's ultra- slim novella of the same name, and it is not hard to see the appeal of a story that offers birth and death, love and murder, several automata and a smidgen of open-heart surgery. If only Wood's artfully rhyming text had filleted Pullman's plot of even one narrative thread, things might have been less congested, but it nevertheless has the virtue of saying what it means with little of the highfalutin verbiage of so many contemporary opera librettos.See the full content of this document
Extract
Murder, Love and a Deadly Puppet
McNeff 's music, meanwhile, takes what it needs wherever it finds it:...
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