Britten
Theatre, Royal College of Music
Josephine
Stephenson: On False Perspective
Professor – Jerome Knox
The Raver – Rebecca Hardwick
Reader – Katie Coventry
Barista – Nick Pritchard
Mathematician – Keith Pun
Algirdas
Kraunaitis: The Bet
Cait Frzzell (soprano)
Mélisand Froidure-Lavoine
(alto)
Daniel Farrimond (tenor)
Julien van Mellaerts
(baritone)
Matthew Buswell (bass)
Lewis
Murphy: Now
Alice – Rose Stachniewska
Ruby – Laura Possonnier
Sarah – Charlotte Howes
Tim – William Wallace
Rupert – James Davies
Hunter
Coblentz: Hogarth’s Bastards
Don Giovanni – Tai Oney
Donna Anna – Gemma
Summerfield
Donna Elvira – Rannveig Káradóttir
Don Ottavio – Craig Jackson
Commendatore – Simon Grange
Edwin Hillier: Serpentine;
or, The Analysis of Beauty
Architect – Nicholas Morton
Ida – Elizabeth Holmes
Will – Peter Aisher
Louche – Mark Nathan
Curl – Cait Frizzell
Coil – Rachel Bowden
Bill Bankes-Jones (director)
Sarah Booth (designs)
Royal College of Music Opera Orchestra
Tim Murray (conductor)
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| The café of false perspective |
It is a brave composer – or indeed
librettist – who writes a Hogarth opera in the wake of The Rake’s Progress. Yet those concerned seemed neither to have
been intimidated nor hamstrung by the precedents of Stravinsky or Auden and
Kallman. Indeed, it was striking that there seemed to be no ‘leave-taking’ in
that sense at all. We had instead five short operas, of roughly a quarter of an
hour each, inspired by different paintings and engravings, yet contemporary in
their settings, brought together as more than the sum of their parts by Bill
Bankes-Jones staging and Sarah Booth’s designs, in which eighteenth-century periwigged
onlookers mingled with their twenty-first century counterparts. Traffic
included characters from previous operas, encouraging one to make connections,
rather than too strenuously insisting upon them. Tim Murray and the excellent
RCM Opera Orchestra offered excellent advocacy, as did an array of young
singers.
 |
| The Bet |
Not the least remarkable
aspect of the evening was that all five composers are RCM composers: four of
them Master’s students, one an undergraduate. With that in mind, and without in
any sense intending to condescend, it is unlikely that many, perhaps any, of
the composers will write as they have done here once they have fully discovered
their mature ‘voices’. Yet they all proved themselves assured writers,
employing a variety of styles. In the crudest sense, the musical language
employed in Hogarth’s Bastards by
Hunter Coblentz stood closest to the nineteenth century, that of Edwin Hillier,
in the closing Serpentine, stood
closest to the later twentieth and early twenty-first, the other composers
falling somewhere in between.
On
False Perspective, music
by Josephine Stephenson, libretto by Benjamin Osborn, opens with an
eighteenth-century reader (Professor) of John Joshua Kiry’s pamphlet on linear
perspective, for which Hogarth provided the frontispiece, A Satire on False Perspective. That introduction frames – visually
as well as metaphorically – a Sunday morning’s exchanges in a modern café ‘in
the city of false perspective’, the morning after the police shut down a rave
that broke the laws of physics. Water flows backwards and falls upwards, at the
barista’s behest. In Stephenson’s score, one hears the musical counterpart to
such antics, though the score never merely ‘depicts’; it contributes to the
drama, as good operatic music should. Likewise, each one of the singers here –
as in the subsequent operas – added something both musical and dramatic, indeed
showed the danger of separating the two categories.
 |
| Now |
And so, the scene was set
for The Bet, for which Algirdas
Kraunaitis wrote both text and music, and for Now (music: Lewis Murphy; libretto: Laura Attridge). Visual framing
connected On False Perspective with The Bet, but there was rhythmic contrast
too, between all three scores. Dance rhythms appeared in different guises,
sometimes more Germanically swung, sometimes more insistent, even perhaps
Stravinskian. Instrumentation was resourceful, command of colour imaginative
and apt. I must admit I could not quite understand why one character in The Bet was made to sing with a cod-American
accent, ‘g’ omitted from the ends of gerunds, and so on; it jarred, at least to
my ears. But again, the singers as a whole impressed, showing splendid
commitment and versatility. Dystopia came to the fore in Now, but equally some sense of resolution, even hope.
The second half offered the
aforementioned ‘extremes’ of Hogarth’s
Bastards and Serpentine. The
former (Coblentz/Jordan O’Connor) offered interaction between five singers
prior to a performance in an apparently disastrous run of Don Giovanni. Coblentz’s score is allusive and witty, even in its
allocation of Don Giovanni to a counter-tenor (the excellent Tai Oney). I was
not entirely sure, though, why the audience found use of ‘fucking’ in the
libretto so hilarious; doubtless there is a matter of confounding alleged
expectations, but even so… There is nice characterisation, though, in O’Connor’s
text: a good deal is done in a short amount of time.
 |
| Hogarth's Bastards |
Serpentine;
or, The Analysis of Beauty
(Hillier; Edward Allen) was for me perhaps the most intriguing. Structure and
instrumentation interact with dramatic possibility suggestively. The necessity
both to ‘toe the line – the Serpentine Line’ in a club, measured up by the Architect,
combines with a clear sense of liberty, or perhaps license. Hogarth’s
eighteenth-century dance hall is reimagined, the ‘S’ figure curve visualised on
stage and somehow also suggested by Hillier’s music. There was some exuberant transvestism to be enjoyed too. This seemed more dangerous,
more exploratory, perhaps more ready to question what opera is and what it
might be. That said, the truly striking impression of the evening was of an
abundance of talent from all concerned: there is hope yet for a form which has
always been far better placed to re-invent itself than the exaggerated
prominence of its largest and often most conservative institutions might
suggest.
