Michael Williams - 'The Prodigal Child'

Reviews

'The music of Michael Williams adds other dimensions, bringing out emotional levels that the words, with immense restraint, leave untold. There are hard rhythmic patterns, barely relieved by contrasting fragments of longer phrases that rise above them. Harsh sevenths and ninths splinter the harmonies. The wonderful resources of a piano quintet are used to the full; a times the strings seem to copy the piano's percussive effects, at others the piano seems to yearn to be as sustained as the strings. At the end, however, as the characters find some tentative bond, the music grows warmer and reflects both and its tentativeness.'

'In place of a massive orchestra, The Prodigal Child uses a piano quintet, and chamber ensembles of this kind have produced some of the finest music in the Western tradition. The audience in New Plymouth was in a tense, concentrated silence throughout; there can be no doubt of the impact this drama and music made.'

Theatre News review March 2003 by Nelson Wattie

'All has not been well at the inn in New Zealand composer Michael Williams' new opera The Prodigal Child, as singer Paul Whelan lets us know in his first aria. Against piano and string quartet, alternating between serene harmonies and scatter-gun rhythms, Whelan sings of the hopelessness of lost, barren pathways and bearing crosses.'

'The Prodigal Child is a mighty achievement for the festival and the opera company.'

New Zealand Herald review March 6th 2003 by William Dart