Barbican Theatre, 11 April 2015

9/11 has become such a strong icon that it is almost impossible to consider any of the events of that day without already having a biased emotional response. That, even fourteen years later, this is the first opera to deal with the subject says a lot about our sensitivity to the destruction of the twin towers. If the outcome, Between Worlds, leaves us unsatisfied I suspect this has more to do with our collective difficulty in facing the events of that day than the creativity of Tansy Davies and Nick Drake. The proverbial Martian viewing this without any context might be confused as to why the emotional impact is so high when the events seem so banal. If this were an earthquake in Japan, or the collapse of a block of flats in India, would we treat the subject in this way; almost certainly not. One only has to consider John Adams’ The Death of Klinghoffer to find a work which interrogates the circumstances as well as the personal tragedies of the day.

There is certainly much to admire in Tansy Davies score. Her choral writing is strongly focussed and the text (without surtitles) carries with unexpected clarity. The narrative moves swiftly and the individual characters are rarely reduced to simple stereotypes. However they are equally undistinguished musically, so that we are not encouraged to respond to their situations as individuals. We respond to the death of Mimi or Tristan because the music leads us emotionally to the point where we are totally involved in their deaths. Here we seem to be barely introduced before they disappear. Only the Janitor, played with great sensitivity by Eric Greene, comes across as a rounded individual. The other four protagonists are unnamed and reduced to a series of passing remarks in an atmosphere which is from the start doom-laden. While the use of mobile phones is a telling reflection on the impact of technology on this particular disaster, we fail to sense the difference between the intimacy of the calls and the universality of the chaos which surrounds them.

Deborah Warner’s production has great clarity and the setting by Michael Levine provides a sharp environment which never attempts to use any of the graphic images from the day itself. Gerry Cornelius draws out the many subtleties in the score which will hopefully come to mean more as we get to know the work better.

At less than ninety minutes there is something of a feeling of being short-changed here. Perhaps it needs Part Two, in the manner of Shaw’s end to Saint Joan where he brings together the protagonists in another world, to start to unravel the one question Between Worlds fails to ask. Why?