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Drama at the opera

Wednesday, 28th May 2008

Stephen Pettitt celebrates the new wave of masterful British productions

The healthy condition of new opera in this country owes much to the solid work being done at grassroots level by idealistic groups run on shoestrings. The Opera Group, for instance, has a fine record of presenting important new work in recent years — its latest offering is Julian Philips’s Varjak Paw — and the fledgling London Contemporary Opera has already flown a notable flag at the festival in Bregenz, Austria. Until this year the Almeida Opera Festival regularly introduced important and enduring new work by composers British and not, such as Thomas Adès, George Aphergis, Per Norgard, Heiner Goebbels, Simon Holt, with productions often taken up at the Aldeburgh Festival and elsewhere. Alas, the event now seems to have been diluted almost out of existence, for this year there’s only one new opera, the British-Cypriot composer Yannis Kyriakides’s An Ocean of Rain. And then there are the regular workshops of Bill Bankes-Jones’s ten-year-old company Tête à Tête. The quality varies hugely, but his is a crucially important organisation in giving practical experience and opportunity to composers who don’t want merely to decorate our lives but also to illuminate them.

Which brings me to the young Swiss-resident British composer Edward Rushton, who for some time has been creating a series of pithy, highly effective chamber operas. His most recent is called The Shops. It was seen at Covent Garden’s Linbury Theatre last year, performed by The Opera Group, and has just appeared on a CD issued by NMC. It’s a miniature masterpiece, holding a mirror up to its audiences just as Mozart did in Figaro, and pouring distinctly good-humoured, comic and indeed charming scorn upon our materialistic ways. Given that such ways might soon lead to the planet’s demise, The Shops, modest and innocuous though it might seem, makes a rather important statement. An exotic and irrational entertainment it is not.