Tête-à-Tête Opera Festival 2013 Day Six was magical

All too quickly it was my sixth and final visit to Tête-à-Tête Opera Festival 2013 and, by my reckoning, these were my fifteenth and sixteen operas in just over two weeks.

The Hidden Valley was the closest thing to a full opera that I saw during the festival. Not only did it tell a complete story but it also ran for about an hour and a half.

It was a fairy story about a river goddess who falls in love with a human against her father's wishes. He turns her in to a series of animals but despite this, years later, the lovers are reunited.

The story teller was a crow, just to reinforce the magical element.

There was a cast of nine with a breadth of voices that gave a richness to the sound. In contrast there were just three musicians (piano, harp, percussion) who provided a light almost staccato background.

Some effort was made with the staging though I never expect much in a festival like this. There were some perfunctory trees on stage but we had to imagine the river, which was fine. It was all neatly done.

The Hidden Valley is the story of Ariene, the river-goddess, and Laura Pooley was superb, especially when mimicking the various animals that she was turned in to including a beetle and a when.

It was all rather magical, as it was meant to be.

Dart's Love had a similar theme (though I had forgotten that), which made it the idea companion piece.

Put simply, the story was river meets man and falls in love, man falls in love with woman, river kills woman, man runs away never to be seen again.

The tale had a strong touch of the ancient myth about it but the music was fresh and modern. The four musicians were placed in the four corners of the river and plucked and blew in short bursts to make a series of sounds rather than a continuous piece. It was still music, rather than sound effect, and added to the atmosphere of the piece.

Dart was played by three women on swings. It was original and effective with their swaying suggesting the movement of the river.

Dart's Love was a lovely short story, it lasted about half an hour, that was enchanting to watch. It was one of my personal highlights of the festival and an excellent note to end on.

I was not in a rush to get home and was loitering in the bar area, as you do, when I was invited to the after party by one of the organisers who recognised me from my frequent visits.

I could not stay long, just long enough to finish my beer, but that was enough for a couple of final operatic flings.

First we had a repeat of one of the Lite Bites that were performed around the festival. These lasted about five minutes and were usually performed in the reception area. The blood on her apron reveals that this was not a happy story.

The final final piece was Nancy's Lament, this being the Nancy of Charles Dicken's Oliver Twist. This was meant to be unusual, and was. The music was provided by a lone guitarist who was then joined by a Dixie Band and a parade that moved through the audience.

It was a shame to have to leave though I left with a happy heart, delighted at what I had seen over the previous two weeks and already anticipating what Tête-à-Tête might do next.

Tête-à-Tête Opera Festival 2013 Day Five was extreme

My fifth visit to Tête-à-Tête Opera Festival 2013 was limited to two performances due to the timings of the shows. There were three operas that I fancied seeing but, luckily, one of them was moving on to Grimeborn (at the Arcola Theatre) and I bought tickets to see it there instead.

The two shows that I did see, Lament and Crocodile, were about as different as two operas could be, and I liked them both.

Lament tells you from its name that it is not going to be a bundle of laughs and so I went expecting slow mournful music, which is what I got.

What I was not expecting was the heavy use of electronics. The music was clearly a lament and there were the sounds of people chanting but the presentation was in the ambient/trance area and it had police sirens too.

Between them the two musicians had one sparsely used keyboard and three computer screens. I am used to this for bands like dan le sac Vs Scroobius Pip (not my usual thing but I saw them supporting Sparks) but to see an opera delivered digitally was something of a surprise. A good surprise.

In addition to the two musicians there was one singer, Katie Slater, playing the role of Ariadne. She wore a microphone and for most of the time her voice was amplified and modified, e.g. with added echo.

There were a few light effects and Katie walked, sat and lay down but visually this was a minimalist performance performed by a minimal group. And I loved it.

My CD collection has things like Portishead, Sigur Ros and Michael Gordon so electronic music and classical music done electronically were not new to me. It was just that this was the first time I had seen it done as a live show billed as an opera.

Lament had the haunted sound that I expected and wanted, and the presentation built on that mood to produce something quite lovely.

The ending was nice too with the performers walking off in the dark while the computers finished doing their thing and then the lights came on and we all clapped an empty stage.

The Crocodile, based on Dostoyevsky short story of the same name, could not have been more different.

It was bright and bouncy, had a large cast supported by a large group of musicians, and it finished with a party that had balloons and silly-string.

The crux of the story was simple, some Russians had got hold of a crocodile that they thought will propel them up in the world of Russian High society, only for it to eat one of them.

Some deep ideas are then explored around what this means, and I should read the story to find out what direction that takes, but the mood of the opera is resolutely funny.

The band set the tone for this playing a series of light jazzy tunes.

There was a life-sized crocodile too, luckily it was a puppet and it was kept well under control by its handler. Clearly the crocodile was a metaphor for something else pertinent to Russian life in the last 19th Century but here it was mostly played for laughs.

The amusing side of the story was emphasised by the costumes with a stereotypical mad professor, a German with goggles, a woman with an electric blue wig and another woman wearing enough make-up to start a shop.

The whole thing was enjoyably silly and smile inducing, much a children's party. There were some laughs too but the Crocodile was not farcically funny in the way that The Secretary Turned CEO was, nor was it trying to be.

Of course there was also plenty of singing and most of the cast had a reasonable amount to do and they all did it reasonably well. There were only a couple of significant singing roles and these were nicely done.

The Crocodile was frivolous and fun and made a packed house very happy.

Tête-à-Tête Opera Festival 2013 Day Four sparkled

Riverside Studios in Hammersmith is about an hour away by bus (65 and 33/419) which makes it quite convenient to go there but it is not close enough to pop-in for just one of the short shows in Tête-à-Tête Opera Festival 2013 so I am only going when there is a full programme to attract me. This means going six times in three weeks to see sixteen shows, and that means missing quite a few more.

What enticed me to the Riverside on this Saturday evening was the varied bill and that was firmly and brilliantly delivered.

The Secretary Turned CEO was, to be honest, added to the schedule to make a full evening of it but it turned out to be one of the very best shows in the festival. A genuine hit.

It claimed to be based on "La serva padrona, Pergolesi’s seminal comic intermezzo of 1733" but it must have gone through some serious reworking to be set in current times in a toilet paper manufacturer's office.

The classic feel was there though in both the form of the opera and the sound of the music. It had many comic elements, verging on farce at times, as well as a simple girl-gets-boy plot.

I loved Alberto Prandini as the Italian intern, and Johnny Depp lookalike, far more interested in playing with his iPhone than actually working. What made that even better was discovering afterwards that he really was taking photos during the performance and was tweeting them. Genius.

The comedy carried the show but the main plot and the singing were good too with sterling performances from both the bumbling CEO (Dionysios Kyropoulos) and his calculating secretary (Charlie Drummond).

MICROmegas was my main reason for going to the festival that evening. Again the claim in the promotion, "Think Hitchhiker’s Guide meets Doctor Who meets Rosencrantz and Guildenstern…" was enough to convince me. It helped that it was based on Voltaire's short story of the same name.

What we saw was the first part of what may become a full opera. That means that we did not get the full story but I don't think that mattered very much as the story was a "banquet of the bizarre" and probably would not have made much more sense if there had been more of it.

Luckily we had an introduction from word-smith David Spittle who explained the three scenes we were to be presented with. Essentially they were all introductions; first we met the giant Micromegas from a planet circulating Sirius, then a group of Artic explorers and finally a dwarf (as far as Micromegas is concerned, he's still a giant compared to humans) from Saturn. Only at the end of the opera do the giant and the dwarf meet and agree to go on an adventure together.

Devoid of a meaningful plot we were left with the characters and their songs. And that was plenty enough. The music and singing were good enough without being spectacular (i.e. strange) and there were lots of little things to pay attention to, like the dwarf's fixation with ties.

It was also good to hear so many musicians, there were about a dozen of them on stage, including a harp, and that helped to produce a rich and full sound.

It did not feel like a work in progress, or even that much like a partial piece, and I can only believe that it will be even better when it is completed.

Guilt caught my eye because it was about Hildegard of Bingen and used some of her words to tell her story.

My expectations were of something medieval  and what I got was something sharply modern. So modern that I had a looked at the music score afterwards to see just how they managed to write down the instructions to, for example, bow at different parts of the strings and at different angles.

The music, from two violinists standing in opposite corners of the stage, was immensely strange and compelling because of that.

What happened on stage was not much less strange either. The cast was just two, who I presumed to be Hildegard and her Mother Superior. The action started with Mother Superior flogging Hildegard and ended with Mother Superior flogging herself. I am not quite sure what happened in the middle.

Guilt was a tableaux rather than an opera (that is just a description, not a criticism) and its triumph was its shocking strangeness. I like being shocked by strange things.

Tête-à-Tête Opera Festival 2013 Day Three was the best yet

My brave decision to go to as many operas as reasonably possible in Tête-à-Tête Opera Festival 2013 is proving to be wise and my third evening there was even better than the good first two.

Fossils and Monsters was a mixed bag of mixed bags with two different musical scenes and two different singing scenes. If that sounds unusual, well it was.

The first scene was musical with two clarinets hidden behind a black wall making vaguely medieval sounds. If anything, it reminded me of Michael Nyman. As an overture it was pleasant enough but rather long with three movements when one would have done.

For the first singing scene brought Alison Wells to tell us about Mary Anning who was famous, apparently, for her work with the fossils she collected at Lyme Regis. This was sung nicely without accompaniment and with great expression.

The second musical scene was more fractured with the two clarinets exchange squawks and squeaks. The two musicians, Ian Mitchell and Catriona Scott, slowly edged on and off the stage to prove that they were real and to give us something other than a black wall to look at. Again this was OK but a little longer than I would have preferred.

For the final scene Alison Wells returned to tell us about Mary Shelley, this time accompanied by some electronic music. There was even more passion this time as she mourned the death of her husband Percy Bysshe Shelley.

The Garden was JG Ballard set to music, and that is high praise.

To emphasise the dystopia we were led to a small community centre in the nearby council estate, a short walk made the more dramatic by the presence of a large number of policemen chasing somebody.

The community centre became the living room and kitchen of a couple. He is struggling at work to get on to an important sub-committee and she is suffering from a mental illness for which she takes pills.

The world outside, we gradually learn, is facing the real crisis of overpopulation and the loss of productive lane while inside we learn, or suspect, that they lost a child once.

In to this double chaos a plant emerges, growing through the lino from the concrete floor. This is a third thing for the couple to cope with and it is a mix of hope and threat.

Eventually the true extent of the dystopia becomes apparent to them and us.

Everything about the production was excellent, stimulating and intense. Pauline Knowles and Alan McHugh sang and acted marvellously which made it easy to engage with them and their plight. Emerging in to the real world afterwards felt as strange as entering in to theirs had earlier.

Vivienne shared some of the structure of Fossils and Monsters with a lone female voice, Clare McCaldin, telling us the story of TS Eliot's first wife, Vivienne Haigh-Wood.

Rather like the play Vanessa and Virginia (Wolfe) this was a life of ups and downs told with great care and expresion.

Early on we had the happy days of the Vivienne dancing to the popular tunes of the day, along the way we heard about her affair with "Bertie" Russell and her story ended in an asylum.

The subject matter and the structure of the performance were intelligently handled and would have made this a good show on their own. What lifted it to the exceptional was the performance by Clare McCaldin who sang and acted with such grace, beauty, humour and despair.

If I had to pick a best show of the festival so far, which is never a fair thing to do because of the diversity, then it would have to be Vivienne.

Tête-à-Tête Opera Festival 2013 Day Two was an excellent mixed bill

My decision to go to Tête-à-Tête Opera Festival 2013 six times is proving to be a good plan and my Day Two offered another mixed bill of operatic entertainment.

Two Clowns: Pagliacci and Gorgonio opened the evening with two different pieces. In the first a pianist wrestles with his page turner to great comic effect, assisted by one of them looking like a cross between Marty Feldman and Andy Zaltzman.

To give just one example of their merry japes, when setting up to play the page turner find that the stool is too far from the piano so he tries to pull the piano towards him.

The second part replaced comedy with strangeness. An opera singer had lost his voice and he told us that story through a recorded voice synthesizer. Accompanying the story was a pianist and a soprano to make it something approaching an opera. Whatever it was it was intelligent and fun.

Black Sand was a fully-formed piece that describes itself as a horror opera. That was what attracted me to it and it lived up to its billing.

It is America 1952, and Nathanael is madly in love with Olympia but is being tormented by the Sandman. Terrified he decides his only defence is to sleep forever.

Nathanael is haunted, Olympia is sympathetic but does not understand and the Sandman has the easy charm and the looks of Rock Hudson.

The story was concise, coherent and compelling; all good tributes. The music and the singing were splendid too. Dark Star was a dense and dark treat, like Death By Chocolate only with a somewhat less happy ending.

There was so much packed in to the forty minutes or so that, like Soon the day before, Dark Star easily warrants another viewing, even if it means traipsing over to Dalston to do so.

Mme Butterfly: The One Man Opera was amazing.

The one man was the son of the original Mme Butterfly who had grown in to a young man and had travelled to America to meet his father, Pinkerton. As he sat waiting patiently for several days for an audience with the great man he told us about his past as a mixed-race child in Japan, what drew him to America.

As with much at the festival, Mme Butterfly is hard to categorise. It is largely a monologue that is acted out with great flourish and attention to detail. For example. I loved Ignacio Jarquin's use of Japanese gestures and the way he flicked his baggy trousers out of the way when kneeling.

A few musician kept him company, most prominent were a flute and a xylophone, and they produced snatches of sound that carried the distinctive Japanese twang. There was some singing from Ignacio Jarquin too, a few songs to puncture the narrative.

Mme Butterfly was a good tale excellently told. A lot of work went in to all aspects of the production, and it showed.

Tête-à-Tête Opera Festival 2013 Day One opened on a high

I discovered the Tête-à-Tête Opera Festival in 2011 when I went to one evening's performances. I was so impressed that last year I went to four. This year I have booked for six!

The heavy schedule of concerts, six evening is just over two weeks, means that I'll have to be brief on my write-ups. I am sure nobody minds that.

Gala opened the show positively.

The festival makes a point of including half-formed and unfinished ideas and ideas that do what they want to do quickly and do not have the urge or the need to expand to anything grander or fuller. Gala is one of these collection of ideas that fuses a simple story with puppetry and a mechanical Salvador Dali in a box.

Gala is a lady, with a surly maid, who is looking for a man and she finds one, Jesus Christ Superstar who is only after her money. It is all very weird but wonderful too, especially Becca Marriott's singing as Gala.

I liked it a lot.

Soon was one of those pieces that could be expanded further, though I loved it in its short form. The idea is simple and brilliant. It is set on a train and explores the lives of some of the passengers.

We meet many people with just a cast of four singers all of whom were good. Leading the way was Kate Symonds-Joy mezzo-soprano who, as the narrator, had the largest role. It was a pleasure to be able to congratulate her personally at the bar afterwards.

The stories were inconclusive fragments, as real life is, but the whole came together wonderfully. I loved the music too.

The End of Civilisation As We Know It was very strange and very good.

It started before we went in to the studio, though we did not know that at the time. Waiting in the reception area we could hear exaggerated operatic singing, this continued as we went in and it became clear that she was singing directly to us and she told us to stand up and hug the person next to us.

The screen at the back of the stage then came to life and we saw the singer, in a mask, with a man who we quickly leaned was plucked from the audience.

What followed was an interview where the woman, Lore Lixenberg, sang the questions in high-operatic style and the man responded well with some good lines.

Somehow Leon Michener managed to accompany this unscripted half-song on the piano. This must have been hard work as at the end he lay down on the floor while, in their hidden room, the interviewer and interviewee closed their eyes are rested.

It took us a while to realise that it had ended, there was no curtain call, and we crept out confused and happy.

My Day One of Tête-à-Tête Opera Festival 2013 was all that I had hoped it would be, and more. It was much weirder than any opera has any right to be (and that is a very good thing), the three pieces were very different, and the music and singing were lovely.