The Crossing, RADA Studios
Alastair
White, WEAR
The Writer – Sarah Parkin
Reflection – Alana Everett
The Designer – Kelly Poukens
The Model – Metty Makharinsky
Reflection – Max Gershon
Ben Smith (piano)
Gemma A. Williams (director)
Derek Lawlor (designs)
Elfyn
Jones, Vicky and Albert
Vicky – Anna Prowse
Elfyn Jones (piano, sound
design, director)
Edward
Lambert, The Clock and Dagger Affair (The Music Troupe)
Belisa – Fleur de Bray
Marcolfo – Kate Howden
Don Perlimplin – Andrew Greenan
Edward Lambert (piano)
Thomas Payne (conductor)
Jaered Glavin (director,
designs)
Daniel
Blanco Albert, Entanglement! An Entropic Tale (Infinite Opera)
Electron – Amy Van Walsum
Baron Entropy – Roxanne Korda
Singularity – Andrej Kuschcinsky
Positron – Charlotte Sleet
Gravity – Shiyu Zhang
Xizofen Song (piano)
Daniel Blance Albert (trumpet)
Aria Trigas (violin)
Tom Pickles (cello)
Arjun Jethwa (flute)
Dominic O’Sullivan (clarinet)
Nicholas Fidler (viola)
Aleksandar Dundjerovic
(director)
Maria Jose Martinez (design)
Margarita Mikailova (conductor)
 |
| Images: Claire Shovelton |
I feel a little ashamed to
admit that this was the first year I had been able to attend any of London’s summer
new opera festival, Tête-à-Tête. Still, in the balance of guilt as it stands in
the world around us, there are probably worse sins. Better late than never –
and what a delight it proved, in various ways, to attend two evenings: one in
King’s Cross, the other not so far away in Bloomsbury.
Location was certainly
important to the first, Alastair White’s WEAR.
(He wrote both words and music.) ‘Space’ may sometimes be an irritating way of
describing a venue, although more often than not it suggests a laudable desire
to question institutional practices. Here, it was certainly the mot juste, ‘The Crossing’ – which, I
confess, I initially had difficulty finding – being just that: a covered
crossing between Central St Martins and the Granary Building. How King’s Cross
has changed since my first visit as an innocent undergraduate. (Awaiting my
late train back to Cambridge, I was approached by a lady of the night, inside the station, with the words ‘how
about you and me get warm together tonight?’ I responded, rather to her
surprise, I think, that it was such a balmy summer’s evening that there would
be no need for that.) Now Granary Square and CSM are there, for one thing, as
well as Kings Place a little closer to the station. Presenting an opera
concerned with – and to a certain extent growing out of – the fashion world and
its social as well as æsthetic entanglements adjacent to the school made a great
deal of sense and genuinely added to the experience. A downside was the
generous acoustic, making hearing the words quite a challenge; rarely, however,
can we have everything.
Such indeed might have been a
message of the opera too. It seems that White’s encounter with fellow founder
of UU Studios, Gemma A. Williams helped steer a project he had initially been
sketching in the direction of the fashion industry. Whatever the history, that
is certainly what resulted: a fascinating one-act piece for piano, voices, and
dancers, in which temporality – both thematically and, I think, within our
experience of the work too – is challenged by not only the ephemerality but
also the artistic aspirations of the world in which it is set. Time is shed in
music just as it is in fashion, in clothing; yet both also persist – or can
persist, taking on lives, after-lives of their own. Set on the edge of the
apocalypse, actions, remembrance, and aspirations take on dramatic edge: not only
in words, but post-Schoenbergian harmony, method, and vocal writing (much
coloratura, perhaps a homage to Berg’s sometime clothes-horse Lulu?) too. Moreover,
to embrace Derek Lawlor’s world of design – Design, perhaps with a capital ‘d’ –
as well as to thematise it, prepared the way for all manner of dramatic
possibilities: both fully realised and suggested. Accomplishment in both
musical writing and performances was undeniable, even spellbinding. Had this
been a song-cycle – or cantata – I should have been gripped, but staging,
including the interpretative yet surely also inciting dance of Max Gershon,
left one in no doubt that this was not only an opera, but an opera of rare
imagination – and success. I am keen to hear more.
To RADA Studios, the following
week, for three one-act pieces. The first two, whether by accident or design,
complemented each other rather well. Elfyn Jones’s short (about twenty
minutes?) piece, Vicky and Albert,
for soloist, piano, and sound design proved a playful affair that yet did not
lack emotional weight. Unabashedly tonal, yet with intrusions from the world of
phone apps and other ‘found’ sounds ranging from a kettle boiling to a Tube
train, we went on a not un-traditional journey – none of the dramatic edge of
would-be conflicting timelines and impossibility, as experienced in WEAR – of a woman’s romantic dalliances
and self-education, albeit with the twist that she learned from (or may have
learned from) dependence on a virtual, app-based boyfriend. It was very
topical, yes, and who knows whether it will last, but that was surely not the
point. Or rather, in a sense, it was yet was cleverly thematised within too.
Fashion and fashions take many forms, yet they will always have room for such
excellence in operatic personality and presentation as shown here by Anna
Prowse as the human, all too human Vicky.
More traditional in form and
presentation, perhaps, or at least differently allusive to opera’s past, Edward
Lambert’s The Cloak and Dagger Affair,
based upon his own adaptation from Lorca’s Amor
de Don Perlimplín con Belisa en su jardin, shared an inescapable element of
contemporary communication: the mobile phone, in this case messages, leading to
(possible) death and (certain) fruitless arousal and jealousy. A cloak and
dagger affair indeed! Taking his leave from Lorca’s own employment of
eighteenth-century music, Lambert intriguingly offered elements (at least) of bel canto vocal writing to vie with a
more ‘modern’ idiom in his piano writing (and playing), showing us, not unlike
Stravinsky, that the smallest changes can sometimes have one listen in a very
different way indeed. Pulcinella
perhaps inevitably came to mind as this re-imagination of a re-imagination of
the commedia dell’arte worked not
inconsiderable magic. Excellent performances, once again, from all concerned.
The element of quantum
mechanics perhaps implicit in WEAR
came to the forefront of the final work I heard, from Infinite Opera: Entanglement! An Entropic Tale, with
words by Roxanne Korda (also singing) and Daniel Blanco Albert (also playing)
offered an overt attempt to make an opera out of physics. The idea is
intriguing yet, to my mind at least, the realisation needed considerable
rethinking. There was something there to be salvaged, I think; however,
attempted reconciliation with more ‘traditional’ operatic themes – what does ‘attraction’
mean when electrons, positrons, gravity, and so on are personified on stage? –
came across with apparently unintentional bathos. Alone of the four operas I
heard, this seemed far too long, fine singing and instrumental playing (very
fine indeed!) notwithstanding. Repeated inability to burst a balloon at an end
seemed all too ready a metaphor for what had gone before. The composer can certainly write music and create meaningful, even dramatically meaningful, musical process.
That is no mean gift; in this case, however, at least for me, it would have
benefited from further guidance.
