Erwartung/Twice Through the Heart, Shadwell Opera, Hackney Showroom, review: You’ll feel the impact long after you leave

The operatic double bill of Mark-Anthony Turnage’s Twice Through the Heart and Schoenberg’s Erwartung is bursting with emotional pain

Bad day: Mezzo Kate Howden performing in Mark-Anthony Turnage’s monodrama Twice Through the Heart

“There’s no way out” repeats the unnamed female prisoner at the centre of Mark-Anthony Turnage’s monodrama Twice Through the Heart. She’s not wrong. Women rarely escape opera alive, even when they haven’t murdered their husbands. But if it’s a form that dooms them over and over again, it’s also one that gives them a powerful voice for their damaged, brutalised experiences.

This telling operatic double-bill, pairing Turnage’s 1997 work with the woozy psychodrama of Schoenberg’s Erwartung, doesn’t so much sing as howl its pain, offering two very different portraits of victimhood – two musical monologues haunted by men who may be absent, but who are far from silent.

The pairing is a thoughtful one, musically as much as thematically. Conductor Finnegan Downie Dear finds the distinctive sonic language of each score, drawing brutally precise and expressive performances from his young band, whether in Turnage’s guttural, rasping music or Schoenberg’s glittering handfuls of textural invention.

Though vocally strong, soprano Madeleine Pierard (Erwartung) gets a little lost in Jack Furness’s Weimar-via-Hoxton conceptualising. Mezzo Kate Howden (Twice) benefits from Celine Lowenthal’s more direct vision, allowing a clean line of emotional sight to the rotting heart of this uncomfortable work. Dramatically concise and psychologically precise, this may be a short evening of opera but you’ll feel the impact long after you leave.