Meantime, I sadly passed-up on BELSHAZZAR to toodle along to FIVE:FIFTEEN instead. I was delayed by personal reasons and missed the opening curtain - so I missed the first of the five (THE KING'S CONJECTURE, Maclaverty/Williams).
Of the rest...
DREAM ANGUS (lib: Alexander McCall Smith, score: Stephen Deazley, staged: Ben Twist) was the best-crafted piece - it seemed to have been written to last 15 minutes (unlike the others) and exploit the strengths of the vignette format. The surreal story of Angus and his cheerful highland pigs is highly potty, but excusable since it is a dream-fantasy anyhow (and no sillier than many other operatic dreams). Very neatly staged, a good bit of work by Twist. Inventively scored by Deazley, and the only one of these pieces which wrote well for voices (instead of mealy-mouthed embarassment about the vocal form). It was almost a pity that the most successful was also the most self-consciously ironic and light-hearted... this may have said something unintended about the "future of opera" (since this Festival set out to show what that Future might be)? That it's all going to be amusing surreal diversions on middle-class neuroses, stuff like FLIGHT? I don't knock DREAM ANGUS, but surely there's more than that? Surely?
THE QUEENS OF GOVAN (lib Suhayl Saadi, music Nigel Osborne and Wajahat Khan, staged: Michael McCarthy) left me wondering, errr, "why?". Scored for just one performer it didn't seem to be an opera at all, but a short solo piece for mezzo and ensemble. Incomprehensible lyrics (inexcusable in a 150-seater venue) and subtitles
that were as big as this on a screen at the back of the stage left me wondering what on earth it had been about - if, err, anything? Musically there were some nice moments in this, and the sarod (played on-stage - for no clear reasons? "We've got a
fuzz-box sarod, and we're going to use it"?) was integrated quite well into the ensemble. Probably it was about something, but (as I have said to the point of tedium here) if you have to read the program notes to know what the hell the piece is about, there is a big problem somewhere. This was poorly staged and I was utterly bored by it - quite an achievement in only 15 minutes. The kind of show in which those staging it had forgotten that the audience had not been through all the rehearsals where the meaning of the piece had been discussed externally to what's actually on the stage
THE PERFECT WOMAN (lib: Ron Butlin, score: Lyell Cresswell, staged: Frederic Wake-Walker) was the only other piece which seemed to have addressed the criterion of working
well in the 15-minute-duration format. Paul Keohone (bar) rather cornered the market in playing mad scientists (he played a psychologist in DREAM ANGUS, too) for the evening, and the macabre tinge of circus sideshow to an ostensibly "elective" surgery operation (anything but "elective", as we saw...) made great theatre. I felt that the cop-out here was that most of the piece was in spoken dialogue during pauses in the music - not what I would really call opera? As though the composer was frightened of the "operrrratttic" cliche of writing, errr, vocal lines? The story has a neat sting in the tail, and this announced clearly that you'd seen the end - rather than just running out of the allotted time-span.
And finally, GESUALDO... (Rankin, Armstrong, McCarthy)... and oh dear, what a dismal offering to have ended the show on. It feels like a 3-hour opera shoe-horned into 14 minutes, as though you've watched BOMARZO on fast-forward. An opera which has five different scenes in five different locations can't work in fifteen minutes, and the grand-guignol opening (a ketchup-fest which I thought was supposed to be a spoof at first) is the operatic equivalent of the old joke about someone firing a cannon to start a show, and then saying "ha! now follow
that!". The music was like the worst of Dr Who in 1979 - I cannot see the point of writing an opera about Gesualdo that doesn't refer to his music - albeit obliquely? Nul points. Alexander Grove worked incredibly hard to make something of the thankless title role, and should not be thrown-out with the bathwater. In fact the casting and singing for all the pieces was extremely strong.
The Chamber Ensemble of players from the Scottish Opera Orchestra played like heroes under deft direction from Derek Scott.
The talking-head filmed sections about the future of opera and the meaning of life as we know it - screened between the pieces, and after the stage had been re-set, not to cover this - would keep me in £5-ers from Pseuds Corner for the next ten years. Intrusive, annoying, redundant, self-congratulatory and very, very unwanted. The only people in the audience who appeared to enjoy them were the people actually in them - who made up (with their entourages in tow) at least half the audience, I would say.
