Sound bites

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.