Tête à Tête: The Opera Festival
Hammersmith Studios
It’s 11 years since I first went to a Tête à Tête evening, then at the Battersea Arts Centre, a most agreeable location, but not used by Tête à Tête since 2004, I think. Nowadays there is a whole festival each year in August, the operatic low season, planned by the founder and artistic director, Bill Bankes-Jones, whose enthusiasm knows no bounds. Sometimes I wonder if it might not be a good thing if it knew at least one or two. The first, and excellent idea he had was to encourage young composers with an interest in writing opera to write a short one, say 20 minutes long, with a pithy text. If you think of the sprawling and shapeless first attempts of many operatic composers, it seems a great shame that they didn’t have a Bankes-Jones to encourage them to keep it short. As I remember, on that first visit I saw four mini-operas, each of which compactly told a story. The peak of this kind of endeavour was Push!, the opera about childbirth, with a series of short linked episodes, brilliantly staged and performed, harrowing and funny.
There seems to be something about the Riverside Studios in Hammersmith, a kind of non-smart man’s ICA, which dictates what goes on there. Thus after collecting your tickets from the box office, if it’s about 40 minutes before the first of the operas, you are treated to a couple of Lite Bites, performed by a soprano and baritone and small chamber ensemble, tiny pieces involving mobile phones and misunderstandings, and faintly bemusing. After that you queue to go into whichever studio the first opera is in, take your seat and — if you’re an old-ish hand — wonder what kind of trendiness you are going to be confronted with.
The evening I went it was, first, a half-hour opera called She Walketh Veiled and Sleeping… by Daniel Saleeb, who also conducted. The text is from Charlotte Perkins Gilman, whose short story The Yellow Wallpaper is a famously agonised account of postnatal depression taken to psychotic lengths. When we entered the studio, the performers were all frozen at the ready, a light-projected wallpaper design illuminating all of them. Gurgles from the orchestra were followed by stammerings from the soloist, the soprano Miranda Heldt. It wasn’t easy to understand what she finally succeeded in saying, but Gilman’s husband’s name John occurred in a recriminatory way, and one realised that she was protesting against male oppression. Odd the way that fragmentation and repetition go hand in hand with pretension: the idea, subconscious or not, is presumably that some things that have to be said are so difficult to say that they can only emerge syllable by syllable, and that many of the syllables have to be stuttered several times before the courageous leap on to the next one can be undertaken. That’s all very well, but if the composer and librettist have anything urgent and valuable to communicate, surely they can depart from this parade of hesitation in order to get the message across. Time was when art was prized for its eloquence.
Still, whatever one might think about the works which Tête à Tête mount, there is never any question of the astonishingly high standard of the execution. Many of these pieces are only performed a couple of times, yet the confidence and certainty of the performances suggest extraordinarily gifted and dedicated instrumentalists and singers, not to mention projectionists and conductors: most of Tête à Tête’s operas these days are multimedia affairs.
The other substantial piece, this one almost an hour and a half long, was Three Tales, with music by Steve Reich, and highly elaborate videos. It had its London première in 2002, and is revived by Ensemble BPM. It concerns three modern occasions, each of them a matter of scientific and technological achievement coupled with actual or evidently possible disaster. The first is of the zeppelin Hindenburg’s disaster: but that was contingent, and, if helium had been used instead of hydrogen, we might be cruising for our holidays in dirigibles today. Still, the footage is exciting: but go to YouTube and be immensely more stirred by the appalled commentary than by any of what we saw and heard in the studio.
Next is ‘Bikini’, the explosion of the atomic bomb in 1947, the removal of the native population, and fleetingly the world’s scantiest swimwear. Finally ‘Dolly’ the cloned sheep. All this is shown and shown again, while a parade of distinguished scientists, prophets and so on, of whom I recognised only Richard Dawkins, attempt to produce sentences but are sabotaged by Reich or a colleague, and characteristically minimalist music churns remorselessly on. Don’t aficionados of minimalism ever get bored with being bored?
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