There's something very cool about Oliver Leith's Last Days. The chamber opera premiered to a series of sold-out shows at London's Royal Opera House in October 2022, which led to a one-off performance at the Walt Disney Concert Hall in LA in February 2024. The cast were dressed by Balenciaga, the libretto is based on a film that no one much cared for, the plot of which is about the death of Kurt Cobain, and the production has a cameo from arty popstar Caroline Polachek. In fact, if memory serves, Dua Lipa went to see the show during its London run.Footnote ¹ These sorts of things can't be said for any other piece of contemporary classical music that I can think of. As a reviewer, this does all weigh on my mind, as do the many other reviews or comments that people have made about the production. Most importantly, or what frames these vogue accolades and the subsequent reputation at least, is that Last Days is an opera. This label, I think, summons all sorts of baggage to play off and thus build an image from: drama, style, opulence, classicisms. But that's not quite what I'm presented with here and that's an important distinction to make. Instead, I'm reviewing the audio recording of Last Days as distributed by Platoon. The only physical release is a triple vinyl, complete with bespoke locking grooves that loop sardonic ringing sounds, such that listeners must ‘answer the phone’ to change the side. Pretty cool.

True of any audio recording of an opera is just how much is omitted: the set, lighting, costumes and acting. But, most importantly here, I'm missing the protagonist: Blake, portrayed by Agathe Rousselle, is a near mute character who only occasionally mumbles some indistinct words. The ominous withdrawal that seems to be potent to the opera's production is replaced here with an actual absence. As such, the supporting characters direct their singing into or at a void. This central lack serves to heighten the novel and bleak handling of narrative. Not much happens in Last Days and even less happens that one didn't already know: Blake – or Kurt Cobain, if you like – is going to take his own life. As a result, I wonder if this recording of Last Days is less about creating a spectacle of woe around the decline of Blake than drawing attention to what precedes an awkwardly appeasing release of grief.

The operatic dimensions of Last Days of course have implications on more specific musical moments, too. Leith has a signature approach to instrumental writing. The lines recall both tropes of nose-up Romantic music and various fuzzy guitar bands like The Smashing Pumpkins, My Bloody Valentine and Slowdive. This already fresh material is put through a sort of filter of wonkiness and haze, where pitches and rhythms become stretched or misremembered somehow. There is an elegant, alluring and sentimental sense of removal and distance from passion in Leith's instrumental writing in Last Days. The vocal composition, however, does not seem to have had the same treatment. Whereas the instrumental sounds gloop and soothe around spectres of classicisms and adolescence, there are many moments when vocal lines break this spell precisely because of, to my ears, how operatic they are. In Act 2, the Private Investigator's loud groaning of ‘Blaaake’ at the start of Scene 4, ‘Confusion’, is more droll than uncanny or bizarre. And the Housemate's expletive delivered in a polished quasi-Wagnerian voice in Scene 2 of the same act suggests the sockets as a comfortable place for my eyes to roll to. These two examples sound like opera singers pretending not to be opera singers (which, I must say, is really not cool). This approach of somehow incorporating the everyday is, partly, what Leith does in the instrumental writing, but the latter feels far more settled its own languid lexicon. To be clear, this is not a slight on the singers’ performances themselves but a clash of styles that sometimes jars and takes me out of the otherwise foreboding haze surrounding the missing Blake.

This disparity is perhaps made more obvious by how rethink-your-ears-beautiful Caroline Polachek's cameo aria is, ‘Non Voglio Mai Vedere Il Sole Tramontare’, found within Act 1 Scene 3, ‘Blake Listens to Opera’. The track was released as a single ahead of the full album on a 7″ vinyl, as is the artefact found in the production of Last Days itself. There is such elegance to this version and Polachek's classically trained but not classical voice pairs celestially with the strings. However, the album version includes moments when the whole recording is slowed down and detuned as if someone – I assume Blake – was playing with the record player itself. Put glibly, this is not far off Leith's approach to instrumental writing, such that when it happens to all the musicians, the result is otherworldly and magnificent. This sentiment is only heightened by Polachek's performance: her top F# emanates from the ensemble and points towards the traversal of sounds and passions beyond what are sensible. The material from this aria reappears as another highlight of Last Days in Act 2 Scene 4, ‘The Super-fan’, this time with a gloomy guitar riff reminiscence of Nirvana's ‘Something in the Way’ and Patricia Auchterlonie gracefully filling in for Polachek.

Despite my initial reservations, I think it's precisely because of Blake's peculiar absence alongside tensions of style that Last Days does something which, as with its reputation, cannot be said of lots of contemporary classical music. It offers an emotional world that sneaks up on you. I'm not sure when exactly – I'm not even really sure what exactly – but every time that I listen through Last Days, feelings of strangeness and barrenness are cultivated within me and linger in my ears. I wonder if the omission of an audible protagonist creates a space for the listener to hear themselves being batted around the quirky-cum-sinister characters’ yearnings. At some point throughout Act 2, I think I start to grieve Blake, but I'm not sure exactly when, why or how, not least because I only know him through what others project on to him. Maybe this sort of sympathy, that flirts with empathy, for Blake is a state of mind afforded by privately listening to Last Days. Other macabre questions, then, are teased out. If we know that someone is going to die imminently, then when do we start grieving? And when or how does grief turn into mourning? At what point might private feelings spill over to the external world, and can or should that be measured? It is only through Leith's masterful combination of melodrama and nonchalance within operatic paradigms that these particular bleak questions are arrived at and make Last Days an emblem of what contemporary opera might achieve.