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FIRST PERFORMANCES
The madcap, hallucinatory adventures of J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan would seem to offer the perfect musico-dramatic vehicle for Richard Ayres. His instrumental works and first formal opera, The Cricket Recovers (2005), are gleeful acts of polystylistic sabotage that might themselves hail from Neverland; the former are often wedded to some strange, dramatic scenario, and the latter is a fantasy about a depressive cricket featuring a would-be tree-climbing elephant. In Ayres's scores, conventional structures, instrumentation and musical materials are juxtaposed, shaken up and hurled about like toys with the accidental radicalism of the child who innocently asks the questions that adults dare not.
It is the very nature of innocence that is questioned in Barrie's modern folktale, and which Ayres and his librettist, Lavinia Greenlaw, set out to explore with mixed results. As in all genuine myths, dark realities, tests and challenges lurk beneath the surface of this Edwardian children's romp which, after all, invokes Pan, the Greek god devoted to wild, animalistic revelry, a figure whom many at the time associated with the resurgence of paganism and witchcraft, and who therefore represents a symbol of moral disorder and a challenge to religious orthodoxy. As the archetypal 'boy who wouldn't grow up', the eponymous Peter exemplifies the refusal to accept responsibility, whilst Wendy grows up too soon into...