Mackenzie Smyth was dared to audition for a TV show. This year, she did something even more extravagant than ever, and invited her friends to join her for a week-long adult summer camp experience. Symphony of Sorrowful Songs is at the London Coliseum until 6 May.Peyton Gloss is the world’s most famous and popular singer & songwriter, known for her chart-topping hits as well as her famous girl squad and July 4th events, inviting all of her famous friends to celebrate. Just occasionally, the production might have benefited from greater stillness – the music, after all, proves the work can take it – but this is an affecting piece of contemporary music theatre from a resurgent opera company thinking outside the box.
In the pit, Lidiya Yankovskaya leads a refreshingly unsentimental reading of the score. It’s visceral stuff, and powerfully sung by Chevalier whose luxurious soprano sails through Górecki’s long lyrical lines. Here, a woman searches for the body of her son as faceless soldiers topple around her. In the final scene, the jagged tangle of ropes suggests an all-too-familiar modern war zone. Embraced by a pair of sinister, hooded figures, she’s dragged away to a despairing “Hail Mary, full of grace”. In the following scene, a woman sings words scrawled by a teenage girl on the walls of a Gestapo prison cell in 1942. Later, she rises to the ceiling on a chair before tumbling to earth in a graceful slow-motion swan dive. In the opening scene, the grieving mother gathers in reams of graveclothes, which she swaddles like a baby. In a visual sleight of hand, her concrete walls turn out to be a closely knit mesh curtain of ropes through which actors can enter and exit. Roberto Vitalini’s mesmeric video design and Jon Driscoll’s haunting lighting are major elements in the production’s success, as is Bywater’s set. As rumbling double basses commence Górecki’s long, ascending crescendo, the charcoal-grey walls appear to melt and flow.
Her son floats above her, suspended between heaven and earth. The opening scene reveals a mother kneeling at a grave (American soprano Nicole Chevalier plays all three women). Set inside what at first appears to be a granitic geometric wedge, she conjures a series of snapshots of women coping with loss. His musical triptych on motherhood and suffering clearly resonates with Isabella Bywater, who has staged the piece for English National Opera. Suspended between heaven and earth … a mother’s sorrow for her son.
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