The Hogboon, Simon Rattle and the LSO, review: 'Did everything a community opera should do'

Simon Rattle conducts the LSO production of Peter Maxwell Davies’s last major work (Getty)

Given his passionate advocacy for music education, it is entirely apt that Peter Maxwell Davies’s last major work, a London Symphony Orchestra commission completed before his death in March, should have been a children’s opera for musicians of mixed ability in the mould of Noye’s Fludde. Writing the libretto himself, he based The Hogboon on an Orkney folk tale. Magnus (seasoned treble Sebastian Exall) is a young Orkney islander who, with the help of a friendly Hogboon (a household spirit), a white witch and her cat, sets out to defend the village from the feared sea monster, Nuckleavee, to win the hand of the Earl of Orkney’s daughter and the earldom in the process.

Premiered by Simon Rattle and the LSO, joined by the London Symphony Chorus, LSO Discovery Chorus and Guildhall School Musicians, it did everything a community opera should do. Broadly tonal, suffused with his later Scottish idiom yet with enough edge to be interesting, it offered a variety of individual roles – commandingly maternal, sinuously feline, or innocent princess for sopranos, a healing contralto for the witch, baritone for the Hogboon and an authoritative tenor for the Earl. Strikingly, the children’s choruses portraying the fearsome Nuckleavee were no mere add-on texture but sat at the heart of the enterprise, and when everybody united at the end to sing “God bless you all. Goodbye”, it felt like a very personal farewell.

The Hogboon can next be seen in Luxembourg with the Luxembourg Philharmonic Orchestra in May 2017