No, not a great opera, not even Martinu's finest, but it contains moments, pages, whole scenes of such archetypal Martinu that no admirer of his should be without it. And on repeated hearings its indubitable flaws do lessen, or rather you begin to realize that you simply have to take the piece as a whole, that it really would be diminished if its barer or more halting pages were cut. It stammers in its utterance, but one can grasp what the stammerer is trying to say; at times even the effort can be moving.
For his last opera Martinu set himself an almost impossible task: to reduce Nikos Kazantzakis's sprawling novel Christ Recrucified to a scenario of four brief acts, to set it in a language not his own (his English prosody is sometimes awkward) and, most difficult of all, to discuss matters that his characters themselves could hardly put into words. The shepherd Manolios, chosen to play Christ in the passion-play of a poor Greek village under Turkish rule, is moved to preach Christ's message in simple earnestness. He preaches charity towards those who are even poorer than he and his fellow-villagers, to a starving group of refugees. ''The light shineth in darkness and the darkness comprehended it not''; he is ostracized, excommunicated, then killed.
It is of Manolios's essence that he is not a silver-tongued Aaron: in his one extended solo he is audibly struggling to find words to express the inexpressible; even the scene in which he is overtly identified with Christ is unassertively still. So the eloquence of Martinu's score is often confided to the supra-personal voice of the chorus or to the orchestra. Manolios has no 'aria' to express his unworthiness of the role of Christ; no more than four hesitant words, indeed. We must await the noble melody that closes Act 1, still more for that which serves as prelude to Act 2, to hear musical images of the goodness of heart that underlies Manolios's perplexity and of the change his election has wrought in him.
The scenes of the opera are more likely to be dramatic or moving as entities than in detail. One of the most tragic of them, in which the exhausted refugee villagers make the hopeless gesture of founding a new village on the aridly inhospitable slopes of a mountain, and in which an old man volunteers to be buried in its foundations to ensure the community's survival, is very plain in its word-setting and is denied a satisfyingly climatic conclusion. Yet in its stoic monody and memories of ancient chant (memories as much of Martinu's Moravia as of Greece) it is moving in its depiction of those who have no choice but to be brave. Moving also are the increasingly luminous scenes between Manolios and Katerina, the play's and the village's Magdalen, the utter simplicity (image of redemptive sacrifice?) that follows Manolios's murder and, more and more, the tellingly bare strokes with which the two communities' austere lives are sketched. Perhaps, then, not just for the shelves of Martinu's admirers after all.
Fittingly, this is an ensemble performance in the best sense of the word, the three principals standing out as much for the truthfulness of their performances as for vocal distinction: Mitchinson's troubled sincerity, Field's sense of self-awakening and Tomlinson's rigid authority are compelling. Choral singing and orchestral playing are very fine under Mackerras's committed direction. The splendid recording has not, as is sometimes the disappointing case, been acidified by transfer to CD, and its spaciousness has if anything been intensified. Despite its flaws The Greek Passion seems more and more like one of the century's essential operas; its return to the catalogue is an occasion for rejoicing.'