Into the Little Hill specifies itself as "a lyrical tale"; "dramatic cantata" might also serve. Its duration is about 40 minutes.
Conductor, instrumentalists and performers are integrated on stage, the singers being two uncostumed women who pace up and down sodium-lit catwalks as they narrate the story and enact it, playing several different characters and combining to embody the chorus.
Martin Crimp's haunting libretto re-imagines the fable of the Pied Piper of Hamelin. The minister of a town besieged by rats enters into a bargain with a ghostly stranger without eyes, nose or ears who undertakes to lure the vermin away with his magic music. The minister needs to be re-elected, the stranger needs money "to live".
The rats duly disappear, but the minister refuses to pay up. In revenge, the stranger abducts his baby, taking him "into the little hill".
The text evokes our fears of the unknown: the rats could be migrant workers, needed and exploited yet despised. The mystery of vanishing is a related theme - the minister claims that the rats have not been exterminated, but left of their own free will. No answers, no explanations: the implications are profoundly sinister.
George Benjamin's score is a miracle. Fifteen players are used to create a hyper-intense sound world. Not a note is wasted or superfluous - Benjamin's ear is unerringly precise, and the sonorities he conjures up by combining conventional instruments with basset-horn, flugelhorn and cimbalom are quite ravishing.
But this isn't an orchestral showpiece. The vocal lines are the driving force, and although the writing is often angular and abrupt, it is also richly expressive and alluring.
