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Short and strange

London
Bridewell Theatre
02/19/2001 -  and 21 February 2001
Ned Rorem: Fables, Bertha, Three sisters who are not sisters (UK premieres)
Rupert Jennings, Ben Cooper, Philip Conway-Brown, Olivia Maffett, Jenny Fisher, Sarah Moule

Anthony Davie (piano/music director), Alison Brown (director)

Ned Rorem is probably most familiar to non-specialists as a composer of art songs that combine evocative, mainly American, texts with music that gives beautiful voices something to work on. His only full-scale opera, A childhood miracle, is a gently disturbing treatment of an American fairy story about desire and death. In this programme of very short "operas", presented by the New World Opera Group, the themes of madness and death are again wryly treated, but somehow the texts are variously too unwieldy to be treated as songs but not rich enough for full-strength music drama. Still, Alison Brown’s neat production and some committed (if rough and ready) performances made for an entertaining evening.

Fables is a setting of Marianne Moore’s slightly mannered translations of La Fontaine. One, "The lion in love", is for solo tenor and the other four are for a "chorus" of two singers plus one or two individual voices for the animal characters. Because the texts are essentially narrative, and in a limited rhetorical register, the result is less than dramatic; the characters’ voices are continuous with those of the chorus. The production picked up on the courtly context of the translations (a long way from low-life Aesop) by presenting the singers in evening dress drinking and schmoozing as if at a cocktail party. They found props to convert them into the animals, but emphasized the similarity between the "animal" behaviour and what people do, for example, grovelling to the powerful but persecuting the harmless weak. It wasn’t always easy to hear the words above the piano, partly because the theatre is a converted swimming baths.

Bertha is a setting of an undergraduate-level comic play by Kenneth Koch, a send-up of the conventions of Shakespearian history. It is set in Norway, ruled by the eponymous mad old queen (sic) who at one point gives the country back to the barbarians so she can invade it again. It’s similar to, but not nearly as good as, Savanarola Brown, and it’s difficult to see the value of setting these words to music at all when the point of the joke is that they are plonkingly obvious. And Rorem’s music is on the whole straightforward declamatory word setting, not nearly ridiculous enough, or parodic. Moira Young gave a spirited performance in the title role, a morph of Margarets of Anjou and Thatcher.

Three sisters who are not sisters, based on a "melodrama" by Gertrude Stein, is far more engaging, partly because the simple fact of singing the surreal text makes it at one more organic and more alien. Three orphan sisters who are not sisters are visited by two true brothers, with both parents living, and they agree to play at killing each other. They do not know whether they are really dead or just playing, or who has deaded whom. It is very funny, spooky and disturbing, with the recurring "it is a dream?" theme and the identification of killing and being killed, an amplification of the connection between aggression and fear. The production gave the sisters a bed each, and had everyone dressed and behaving as children, with the boys in Just William (or Bluebottle) shorts.

This programme is part of an "Opera Bites" season at the Bridewell, collections of short pieces of opera. The other two programmes are a selection from operas by Henze, Ligeti and Turnage from the ENO Studio, and "Shorts", a revival of Tête à Tête’s evening of five short new operas originally seen at the Battersea Arts Centre in 1999.


H.E. Elsom

 

 

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