‘Praising! That’s it!’ Rilke exclaims in one of his ecstatic Sonnets to Orpheus. It seems to be an unconditional injunction, but he hadn’t tried being an opera critic, and I’d like to see anyone even try plausibly to praise either of the two productions I saw this week. One was new and absolutely terrible, the other was old, neglected and may or may not be good — it wasn’t easy to judge. Tête à Tête is an opera company and enterprise that I have often admired and enjoyed, but its speciality is very brief works, which could hardly be staged alone, and which don’t demand of their librettist and composer that they write an extended piece with all the problems that involves. Inevitably, some of the composers whose work it puts on get the idea that, once a ten-minute piece has succeeded, they might have a go at something bigger, and in the case of Circus Tricks, text by Michael Henry and music by Adey Grummet (or the other way round — the programme states both), they have produced an opera that is slightly less than two hours long.
The set is attractive, colourful and evocative. We have a knife-thrower, an acrobat, a trapeze artist, a contortionist and a pony, as well as a cut-out elephant. The theme of the circus performer with his or her own dreadful private problems has been tackled before, and rather successfully: I Pagliacci is well on the road to immortality. Circus Tricks had better make the most of the few days so far allotted to it.
No complaints about the performers. The six-person band, mainly wind- and percussion-based, consists of tireless virtuosi from CHROMA. Every now and again an attractive idea pops up for one or another of them, but is lost in the ongoing aimless drive. The singers have to be quite versatile, though crucial things are ducked: the knife-thrower whose assistant is in love with him has a handful of knives, but only pretends to throw them. The contortionist, richly sung by Lilly Papaioannou, doesn’t vary her positions that much. The strong guy doesn’t have his brother standing on his shoulders, but on a ledge behind, etc.
Perhaps if the drama were more absorbing I’d have been less literal in my demands. And if it had been more audible. One gets the rough idea of what the singers are up to — they have to sing their stage directions — but far too many lines were unintelligible to me. Because of the music’s drive, and the superb account of Barney the trick pony by Christopher Diffey, the first few minutes were quite enjoyable, but after that I felt trapped in a hell of boredom. Please, Tête à Tête, back to shorties.
University College Opera specialises in resurrecting neglected works from, mainly, the last two centuries, and looking through the list of its productions over 61 years, you remember how many operas you’d never have seen if not at the Bloomsbury Theatre or its predecessor(s).
Given that almost all the performers are amateurs, the things that fare best are rumbustious pieces from the latter half of the 19th century and a bit later. They haven’t often ventured into the Baroque, wisely. But this year they have mounted the first ever UK production of Rameau’s Acante et Céphise, and what they conjecture may be the first staging since the 18th century. The opera has a threadbare plot — The New Grove Dictionary of Opera calls it ‘puerile’, but says that the music is better than it deserves. Probably it is, Rameau tending to be a composer of consistent inventiveness, even if you resent the forms in which he most often embodied that.
But the kind of account that UCOpera gave made it hard to judge. Even in a piece like this, primarily written to celebrate a royal birth, one wants to know what the words are, and the singers’ French enunciation was vague, while the surtitles were for the most part too faint and too fast to be legible. And as usual the orchestra contained some competent players and some who found it impossible to get or stay in tune.
Lawrence Olsworth-Peter and Katherine Blumenthal took the title roles, and both were adequate; some of the other soloists were painful. The opera, as usual with Rameau, has long stretches of ballet, but on the stage of the Bloomsbury Theatre this consisted mostly of exercises that one might have done in an elementary PE class. The trouble, I suppose, for such an occasional company is that it can’t resist doing operas from a period that is currently favoured; but the French Baroque needs just the qualities that UCOpera are least likely to be able to bring to it.
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