Climate change has also arrived at the traditional Aldeburgh Festival on the East English North Sea coast, in the county of Suffolk.
In the opening days of the festival, which has now picked up speed again after a two-year break due to the pandemic, it was a topic twice.
With varying degrees of success.
The chamber opera “Violet” by Tom Coult, who was born in 1988 and is currently a shooting star on the London music scene, avoids pointing finger wisdom and instead brings a British-style spooky story to the stage.
Alice Burch's clever libretto paints the picture of an average couple and a village community who experience the race against climate change as a treacherous theft of time.
At night, the hand on the tower clock mysteriously jumps forward first by one hour, then by two, and so on.
The countdown is displayed on a guillotine that has been discreetly pushed into semi-darkness, the digital cloudy sky in the background turns sulphurous yellow and fiery red and sometimes mutates into a playground for virus populations.
In the village, social life gets out of joint;
and the two main characters of the four-person play, Violet and her husband Felix, undergo a subtle shift in consciousness.
He, thinking rationally but blind to what is happening, reacts increasingly helplessly and aggressively.
She intuitively grasps the intangible new, wants to get out of the patriarchal confines of the household and suddenly has eyes for her surroundings.
Eventually she builds a lifeboat, but even with that there is no escape.
For the macabre parable, Coult has invented music that is two-dimensional but very lively and colorful in detail.
The instruments of the London Sinfonietta combine unobtrusively with loudspeaker sounds, the ticking rhythms of the percussion instruments, which haunt the score, contrast with the slowly unfolding sound processes.
Anna Dennis, who shone last year as Empress Rodelinda at the International Handel Festival in Göttingen, has a brilliant role here as Violet, Richard Burkhard as her stuffy husband goes along powerfully.
The abysmal play, which was staged two years late due to the pandemic, will have its German premiere next October at the Ulm Theater.
The current time reference in "Houses Slide", a concert installation by Laura Bowler, who was almost the same age as Coult, was artistically less fruitful.
In the background, thirteen cyclists provide a more visual than acoustic attraction, in front the London Sinfonietta under Sian Edwards goes through the usual catalog of noise sounds, and a soothing text marathon on the subject of climate catastrophe trickles out of the loudspeakers.
A singer, also on a bicycle saddle, transposes the message into panic register.
While the cyclists cycle on undeterred, the composer lets herself be heard in a vocal performance with a warning voice.
With a Fridays-for-Future concert hall demo like this, she's running into open doors among the younger audience.