Robin Holloway wrote his opera, Clarissa, in 1976; it wasn't premiered until 1990, for a performance run in London that MTT attended. MTT was so excited by the music, he asked for an orchestral suite to be composed out of it. This took form in 1998, when the soprano who was scheduled to sing canceled due to illness. So the composer blazingly reworked the piece into an orchestral version. It only took twelve years to find a suitable singing replacement, as we finally heard the piece Thursday night. And what a replacement it was!

Erin Wall made the long wait well worth it. Instant gratification, shminstant gratification. Good things come to those who wait, and the sculptural 35yo Canadian soprano hit one out of the symphony hall. Clarissa the opera is an adaptation of the Samuel Richardson novel, where Clarissa's dad wants her to marry for financial reasons, and she'd rather escape with Lovelace, who looks tempting at first, but turns out to be a sleazebag. The three movements of the Sequence see her first pondering her misery and the cruelty of her dad; then escape in a world of fantasy; then it concludes with a fire which is both a plot twist in the book and a metaphor for Lovelace's flame. Fire is extinguished and Clarissa remains, pure and vindicated. Erin gave a radiant performance of the piece, she was so breathtaking in the first movement that the subsequent two orchestral-only movements sounded too plain for us, and we were pining for her to stand up again despite the rich textures and fertile inventions of the score.