Oliver Rudland might be the greatest opera writer you have never heard of. At least, this is the view of Simon Heffer, political commentator for The Daily Telegraph. In his view, Rudland, is “one of our most gifted young composers” who has an “uncanny ability to write music that invited an intelligent audience in, rather than sought to exclude them in favour of appealing to a small club of insiders”.
Indeed, Heffer notes that Rudland’s lack of acclaim is symptomatic of a greater problem within the musical establishment – a snobbery, which he hopes will not survive the current pandemic.
Heffer cites Rudland’s one act opera, Pincher Martin, based on William Golding’s book of the same name, which focuses upon a man who finds himself shipwrecked in the Atlantic and slowly goes mad. A 2014 version can be found on YouTube, directed by Rudland himself.
While Heffer notes that Opera Houses across the world have resorted to making a deal with devil and cooperating with resources such as YouTube to stream previous performances, he wonders why Rudland’s corpus has been excluded from this. He considers the writer's gift, writing that: “What makes his music so powerful is the way he uses it, whether in his operas or his orchestral writing, to tell a story.”
Heffer concludes, asking opera houses to given consideration to the works they support in future. He writes that institutions ought to reflect upon whether or not: “they are really encouraging that talent, or just playing safe with old favourites and “approved” modern composers, much of whose music would serve well as an alternative to custody.”
