Broken Wings

At any rate, the piece that breaks that cycle of Rojo’s, opens this programme and inspired Perry’s offering, turns out to be really rather special. Entitled Broken Wings, and reuniting Lopez Ochoa, Meckler and Streetcar composer Peter Salem, it explores the life and mind of the celebrated Mexican painter Frida Kahlo (1907-1954).

It begins noirishly and abstractly, with the young Kahlo (Rojo) emerging on top of a large cube, surrounded by a part-playful, part-menacing cohort of demons adroitly decked out as Day of the Dead participants. Thereafter, these characters – deftly conceived, unmistakably Mexican emblems of psychological torment and malign fortune– are never far away, constantly waiting to pounce. As, indeed, they soon do.

With Rojo effortlessly passing for 18, Kahlo dances an engagingly carefree duet with a young fellow (Cesar Corrales), whereupon Salem’s light-hearted but rhythmically complex music suddenly screeches to a halt, the colour instantly drains from the stage, and she is brutally snatched into the air by her skeletal coterie.

Peter Salem’s score is extraordinary. The wonderful ENB Philharmonic are set challenges with all three works, not least needing to co-ordinate with recordings, and they rise to it magnificently under the ever skilful baton of Gavin Sutherland. Everything was polished and exact. The percussion must be especially commended as they have to play a bicycle wheel and traditional Chinese instruments! Not to be left out, the horns get to pretend that they are Herb Alpert’s Tijuana Brass but playing a version of The Internationale that appears to have been arranged by John Cage. Fragments come and go, sometimes distorted, as if they were written on scraps of paper which the orchestra have been told to play at random.