Abstract
The madcap, hallucinatory adventures of J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan would seem to offer the perfect musico-dramatic vehicle for Richard Ayres. His instrumental works and first formal opera, The Cricket Recovers (2005), are gleeful acts of polystylistic sabotage that might themselves hail from Neverland; the former are often wedded to some strange, dramatic scenario, and the latter is a fantasy about a depressive cricket featuring a would-be tree-climbing elephant. In Ayres's scores, conventional structures, instrumentation and musical materials are juxtaposed, shaken up and hurled about like toys with the accidental radicalism of the child who innocently asks the questions that adults dare not.
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