Greek

Mark-Anthony Turnage's edgy, musically eclectic opera transposes the Oedipus story from Sophocles' plague-ridden Thebes to a Thatcher-era England wracked by social disintegration and violence. Enthusiastically received at its 1988 premiere, Greek reached a wider audience thanks to this 1990 BBC filmed version. The libretto transforms the tragic Greek hero Oedipus into Eddy, a thug thrown into the street by his clownish adoptive parents. After killing a diner owner in a quarrel, Eddy marries his widow, only to later discover that she's actually Eddy's mother (earlier, Eddy achieved popular hero status by defeating the Sphinx, here a destructive grotesque monster with two female heads). The transpositions aren't always logical (two-headed beasts were not commonplace in Thatcher's England), and some will bristle at the verbal vulgarity, but there's no denying the sophistication and energy of the music, which veers from harshly dissonant percussive patches, to a brilliantly stylized battle between Eddy and his true father, to a hilarious parody of a music-hall song for his adoptive mum and dad, with lyrically soaring moments thrown in as well. The performance is a definitive one—featuring the four original multi-role singers—nicely refashioned for the screen, with visual and audio qualities (in PCM stereo) that are adequate (this is, after all, a nearly two-decades old TV production). Recommended. Aud: P. (F. Swietek)