We’ve all known dinner parties that went on too long, but rarely with the consequences of the one in Thomas Adès’s new opera, The Exterminating Angel, which has just had its British premiere at Covent Garden after an acclaimed world premiere last year at Salzburg.
Based on the famous 1960s Buñuel film of the same name, it’s a piece that has to stretch a single narrative theme across two hours of music – the idea being that a group of apparently civilised haut-bourgeois swells are trapped by some mysterious force around the dining table for days, weeks, perhaps for ever, in the course of which civility breaks down. Surreal things happen during this entrapment, which is as well because if they didn’t the audience would get as restless as the opera’s characters.
