CLASSICAL MUSIC / Maxwell Davies' shockers sprout again in Brussels

FOR MOST musicians, Easter means another round of Matthew Passions and Bach motets, and the first of the year's two stabs at religious affirmation. But in Brussels last weekend it meant Sir Peter Maxwell Davies at his most affirmatively irreligious - en fete in a triple bill of music-theatre shockers from the late Sixties and early Seventies, which have been resurrected (sorry) by a remarkable company called Kameropera Antwerpen Transparant and are now on tour elsewhere in Belgium.

If you were looking for something to set a standard for the composer's 60th-birthday celebrations later this year, then look no further. Here it is. And its centrepiece is Vesalii Icones, Davies' 1969 dance-

drama, written to a sequence of images partly derived from the grotesque anatomical drawings of Vesalius and partly from the Stations of the Cross.

What happens in the piece is, to borrow the title of another Maxwell Davies score, a process of revelation and fall. In Vesalius's drawings the tissue of a human body is progressively peeled off until the skeleton becomes exposed. In the Stations of the Cross the humanity of Christ is stripped away until the saviour is revealed in glory at the Resurrection. And Davies' sting in the tail is that his Jesus rises again as the AntiChrist, a false saviour who dances to what, for Davies, is the music of betrayal and duplicity: a foxtrot.

The obvious comment to make about Vesalii Icones - and about the other items in this triple bill, the Eight Songs for a Mad King (1969) and Miss Donnithorne's Maggot (1974) - is that it's a period piece. It

reflects and to some extent concludes an obsession with the idea of religion as falsehood that Davies' music used to wear brazenly on its sleeve but then internalised into its psyche,

beyond the surface level of the sounded notes. As an overt source of creative energy it came to be replaced by other things. But for all the fierceness of his secularism - so fierce that he must be a candidate for deathbed conversion - Davies has always been an essentially spiritual animal. And the prevailing spirituality of Vesalii Icones - over and above the assault of its ending - is what gives the piece an enduring stature, wholly engaged in the pathos of each Station and capable, in the multi- layered resonances of the writing, of luminous serenity.

This Belgian staging is especially serene, choreographed around a dissecting table which provides the support for a lot of lateral, intense, slow-motion movement. The solo dancer is compelling; as are the Prometheus Ensemble, who sit on stage, play immaculately and include a fine cellist, equal to the demands of a virtuoso role which is the instrumental counterpart to the dancer.

The Eight Songs and Miss Donnithorne are both studies of madness - the one explosive, the other a more gently introspective lunacy - and have lent themselves over the past 20 or so years to performances where refinement was not a priority. But again, these Belgian stagings were beautifully considered. Miss Donnithorne (a musical recreation of Dickens's Miss Havisham) berated her wedding cake with a heavy European accent of the Peter Sellers school that, even so, was touchingly effective. And although the breaking of the violin in the Eight Songs was as wilful as I've ever seen it (smashing a musical instrument has a disturbing potency in a musical environment: like molesting a child on an Esther Rantzen show), the mad king had uncommon sensitivity. Even dignity. It was as if the director (Ian Burton) and conductor (Etienne Siebens) were trying to redeem these pieces from their past, protesting, rough-and-tumble lives and find in them a new voice for new audiences. Which is exactly what they need. Miss Donnithorne and the Eight Songs define a genre that could easily disappear between the cracks of taste: not new enough to be current or old enough to be classic. But Kameropera Antwerpen's stagings prove them wholly viable, handled with enough care and intensity to substitute for the unrecapturable raw shock they first delivered years ago. They'd make prestigious imports to a British festival - please note.

Meanwhile, on the export front, Welsh National Opera have been playing their celebrated Pelleas et Melisande at the Chatelet Theatre in Paris - again - and having caught the train down from Brussels to see it I can testify that this audacious variant on coals to Newcastle is the talk of the city. WNO's Peter Stein staging, with a minor miracle in every scene-change, has been technically overhauled so that the changes happen faster and the second interval can be dispensed with. The result is tighter, more sustained. And although Pierre Boulez has been too ill to conduct, as he originally did in Cardiff, his American protege David Robertson (the new musical director at IRCAM) is an impressive substitute - a clean, exact technician, but ideally sensitive to what the French would call the suggestif potential of the score and providing softer, more pliant phrasing than I can recall from Boulez.

The cast is the same as in Britain and, after so long an involvement, deeply absorbed into their roles; especially Alison Hagley's delicately capricious Melisande. And Boulez- fanciers will be pleased to know that the maitre was in the audience, back after a cancer operation and looking well. It's ironic that WNO should score a triumph of this magnitude abroad at the same time that its General Director, Matthew Epstein, is resigning in protest at the lack of home-grown government support he gets.

American visitors to London this week included the soprano Jo Ann Pickens, whose bright, glistening vocal liquidity sent a fan-club audience crazy with a French / American recital at the Wigmore, and La Gran Scena Opera Co who, as usual, provided rich material for psychotherapists at the Bloomsbury Theatre. La Gran Scena, if you don't know, is a cabaret collective of bouffant, jewelled-and-feathered divas from New York who sing opera and happen to be men - it's a vocal drag show - but with such convincing falsettos that you occasionally need to consult the programme to make sure. And it's an in-house entertainment. Unless you follow opera or are gay (preferably both) you'll never understand the Kathleen Battle jokes.

Alas, the jokes are wearing thin these days: the show is really only one idea, and it's been running for too long. But what I still like about La Gran Scena is the way it outs the very thin line opera treads - even without the sequins - between high and low art: the sublime and the absurd. It also harbours the odd wisdom (surtitles: an invention that allows you to enjoy opera without needing to watch the stage). The current show includes a Rosenkavalier in a New Jersey shopping mall after the school of Peter Sellars (the director as opposed to the comedian). Let's hope he hasn't seen it. It will give him ideas.

La Gran Scena continues to Saturday (071-388 8822).