Ours is a golden age for new opera, at least if variety is a measure of vitality. There are plots to suit every taste and scores tailor-made for the most diverse array of performers and audiences the art form has ever attracted, from the homeless to the under-twos. And while the operatic main stages do schedule new works alongside the much-loved old, it’s small companies and pop-up festivals that seem most obviously determined to forge a brave new operatic world.
These are optimistic ventures: London’s Tête à Tête company describes itself as “the future of opera”. It is also fundamentally energetic: 400 world premieres later, the Tête à Tête opera festival is in its 11th year, with sound walks and free outdoor performances now added to the mix. But its core business has always been programmes of operatic shorts. This year boasted works spanning – as the artistic director Bill Bankes-Jones put it in his introduction – from “the very embryonic to the very polished”.
At the glossier end of that spectrum, two operas stood out. Vicky and Albert, created for soprano, piano and sound design by Elfyn Jones, was a quirky, poignant reflection on a woman’s relationship with her smartphone (imagine an operatic Her or Poulenc’s La Voix Humaine with the unheard lover ditched in favour of the handset itself). Jones used sound design not just for scene-setting but to listen in to his heroine’s life, following her on to the underground, tracking her heels across a pavement, hearing voices in a bar blur and warp as a night wears on. It was a striking ploy largely unmatched by the music (in which jazz-lite alternated with the mildest of modernisms). But as a woman trying out a boyfriend app, Anna Prowse was genuinely compelling, her velvet tone transforming lyrical passages into brief flights of emotional intensity.
Edward Lambert’s adaptation and setting of a Lorca play in the Music Troupe’s The Cloak and Dagger Affair for three voices and piano was more musically sophisticated, exploiting the physical exertions demanded by extravagant ornamentation to create a score whose eroticism was often visceral. The performance was excellent. Fleur de Bray’s pouting, prancing heroine flitted with ease across registers, while Andrew Greenan, as her already-cuckolded new husband, combined warmth and serious projection-power. Kate Howden, as his bodyguard, provided a deliciously dark middle ground between them.
And then there were the festival’s glimpses of the operatic future beyond “the very polished”. Blue Electric, a work in progress, was well sung and neatly designed, but its sound world was too reminiscent of Britten to point to the future. Two explicitly sci-fi operas grappled with the laws of physics. Entanglement! An Entropic Tale involved a seven-piece ensemble and an explanatory handout. But with almost invisible surtitles and often inaudible words – “Behold the nefarious black hole!” was a line I did catch – the plot remained baffling. Einstein’s Dreams parcelled out its physics into short narrations, interspersed with vignettes in an earnest musical-theatre mode about the passing of time. Or so I thought, until a feather duster produced inexplicably from a handheld mic made me question everything.
Nothing, though, was more bizarre – or more self-consciously anarchic – than the rambling, crowdfunded “techno-apocalypse-noise-spoken-word-electronic-opera” NIBIRU! There was a hypnotic electro soundtrack, a 2D-lifesize Queen Elizabeth II, and free biscuits. There wasn’t much singing, which no one seemed to mind. But is this the future of opera? I doubt it.
