“Lots of people know the name, but they don’t actually know what the story is about, or the fine details,” says David Sawer of Rumpelstiltskin. Like many of the traditional fairy tales collected and retold by the Brothers Grimm, the story that inspired the composer’s latest work is, as he puts it, “dark and violent and doesn’t have a happy ending.”

Performed by 13 musicians and six dancers, Rumpelstiltskin represents another step forward in terms of Sawer’s long-running exploration of the creative possibilities of mixing music, theatre and dance. Earlier this year, Leeds-based Opera North premiered Skin Deep, his operetta with a libretto by satirical mastermind Armando Iannucci. But the roots of Rumpelstiltskin reach back to the start of the decade, and a sequence in the work From Morning to Midnight.

“It was an opera,” Sawer recalls, “but there was no singing in the first scene for about five minutes. It described the boredom and repetition of working in a bank and the singers just moved around according to precise stage instructions which were written into the score and coordinated with the music.”

Keen to develop this idea further, Sawer conceived a narrative piece of music theatre, with musicians and dancers sharing both the stage and the storytelling. “I’ve called it a ballet; it is a ballet score, but there’s no conventional ballet steps. It’s more in the feel of a silent film.”

Commissioned by Birmingham Contemporary Music Group and presented by BCMG, hcmf and Glasgow’s Tramway, Rumpelstiltskin premiered in Birmingham and receives its first Northern performance at hcmf on Sunday 22 November, conducted by Martyn Brabbins.

Sawer explains what attracted him to the tale, in which a miller’s daughter forced to spin straw into gold is helped by a mysterious little man, but for a heavy price: “The musical idea of straw turning into gold is very strong. Also things happening three times, the power relationships between the characters changing throughout, I thought that was very interesting. And Rumpelstiltskin’s dance of death at the end.”

“It’s quite open-ended: Rumpelstiltskin’s obviously perceived as outside of society and we’re not quite sure what he wants. But he’s the only honest character. All the others – the miller’s daughter, the king – they’re all after greed and wealth. I also liked how the whole thing is set off by the miller boasting. I thought that was an interesting idea, that an idle boast at the start of the story he makes to avoid being evicted by the king’s bailiffs then turns into this sequence of lies and puzzles and games, which culminate in Rumpelstiltskin’s death.”

In a time when the weird and unsettling elements of many folk tales have been airbrushed out in favour of a more merchandise-friendly sparkle, Rumpelstiltskin certainly throws into sharp relief the gulf between the familiar mechanics of fairytales – an obedient daughter, a prized royal marriage – and how dark such a story would be when played out as actual human morality. “I guess this is why Hollywood or Disney haven’t done a cartoon version of it,” Sawer agrees. “The characters are all selfish, and the goalposts change through the piece.”

Rumpelstiltskin reunites the composer with the Skin Deep team of director Richard Jones and designer Stewart Laing. “I wanted to work with Richard Jones again because he directed From Morning to Midnight and his work is very choreographic and sensitive to music. So what’s happened is that the whole thing is driven by the music, but we’ve decided, say, a sequence of 10 actions that the dancers will do, and that it will happen on the fourth beat of bar 45, or whatever, and then drill that into the dancers.”

“I think only dancers could do this, because they’re used to counting,” he says. “It’s marvellous to see them with the score, marking where they move. They just count for an hour. It’s like they make the music visible, they articulate it through their gestures and movements, because there’s nothing vocal.”

So how exactly does a wordless dance piece communicate a plot that hinges on the quest to discover Rumpelstiltskin’s name? “Yes, well that’s one of the problems to solve in the piece,” Sawer replies. “It’s a combination of music and action in the end: there are various musical motifs going around, subliminally. Also the gestures of characters are copied by other characters, so that’s how information gets transferred from one to the next. You should get the story by just looking and listening.”

Musically, Sawer defines Rumpelstiltskin as “absolutely a concert piece. The musicians are onstage, they will be in costume and they’re integrated into the set and the visual aspect of the piece.” Different themes and moods are formed through creative use of the BCMG’s 13-player ensemble. “Most of the time the players are divided into two: 12 on one side of the stage and a harpist on the right-hand side. Throughout the piece, three different players from the left-hand side of the ensemble move towards the harp to form a quartet,” he explains. “The first time it’s the strings, and that sound world, which is very primary-coloured, is used for the straw into gold section.”

Contrasting atmospheres come from combining the harp with flute, oboe and clarinet and with bassoon, tuba and double bass. The music accompanying Rumpelstiltskin’s house is played by bass clarinet, horn and trumpet, “so it’s quite mellow and Miles Davis-like”. He adds, “As the piece progresses, the instruments gradually mix up. There are three principal themes which are orchestrated by these groups throughout the piece. So the sound world is quite consistent; it’s not pointillistic.”

Sawer describes Laing’s costume design as having an “Eastern European” look, whilst the set uses a box made out of recycled wood with sliding doors to evoke interiors from a house to a dungeon. “It’s timeless and contemporary at the same time. It’s not set in 2009.” Considering the story’s themes of magically increasing wealth and destructive greed, was he never tempted to draw more explicit parallels with today’s world?

“Well, when I started the idea in 2004, I thought, ‘oh well, this is all about the Iraq war,’” he replies. “With these parables, you can hook them on to anything. They are mythical, in a way. These oral folk stories which have been written down, they’re based on some truth in the past, and therefore it is also some truth of today. We see these people – the miller, his daughter, the king, Rumpelstiltskin – almost every day.”

Click here to buy tickets for Rumpelstiltskin on Sunday 22 November

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