Intermezzo

Opera Shots at the Royal Opera House

Opera Shots - Linbury Studio, 18 June 2010

Opera Shots is the Royal Opera House's latest attempt to broaden the appeal of opera. Three contemporary composers not known for their operatic leanings have each written a short piece, none of which most people would recognise as 'opera' in the Tosca (or even the Jerry Springer) sense.

First up was Orlando Gough's A Ring A Lamp A Thing, a tour-de-force from Melanie Pappenheim. With little more than a sofa and a handbag, she holds the stage alone for its whole half hour length. In Caryl Churchill's fragmented libretto a visit from a genie is spliced with everyday reminiscence. The random associations are dreamlike. Pappenheim's looped and layered vocals (mixed live, I think) disorientate further. It's a rather shapeless piece that could be chopped up and messed around without losing much. But it's also highly theatrical, the closest the evening came to conventional opera in the sense of integrated music and drama.

In contrast, the formal structure underlying Nitin Sawhney's Entanglement would have been obvious even to those who hadn't read the programme notes, where the erstwhile chartered accountant explains how he combined his five female voices according to precise mathematical ratios of exponentially accelerating tempos. The form is ingeniously matched to the subject matter, the moment of uncertainty between taking a pregnancy test and discovering which one of the several possible outcomes will be the result.

It's slim subject matter to stretch out over twenty minutes, and indeed if there's one thing the work lacks, it's dramatic tension. Scored for string quartet, tabla and bansuri flute, the formal beauty of the music is masked by a deceptively soothing, spa-treatment quality that will wash over the inattentive listener (like the woman behind me, who pronounced it "a massage for the ears").

Sawhney's own impenetrable multilingual libretto (we were given translations, but of course they were impossible to read in the darkened theatre) adds little. The direction, cool minimalist park and bark (again, Sawhney's own) is either brilliantly appropriate or uninspired, I couldn't decide which, but decidedly inessential in either case - you'd wouldn't lose much by shutting your eyes the whole way through. The one thing I really didn't care for was the projection of the amplified vocals only from way above the stage, an alienating effect rather like watching a part mimed while someone sings from the wings. 

Finally came Jocelyn Pook's Ingerland, a series of songs not bound together cohesively enough to call an opera, but entertaining all the same. Its timely subject is football, and its team of thirteen tackled everything from the tribalism and emotional absorption of the fans to the more trivial concerns of the WAGs.

Some of the texts were taken directly from filmed interviews (also played between numbers), some were brilliantly arranged terrace chants, others just touched on related subjects. It scored highest with its inspired pairings of texts and musical treatments, like the liturgical Zinedine Zidane, or bass George Ikediashi's gravely-intoned evaluation of the sport: 'boring'. A late diversion into the subject of plastic surgery introduced a feminist element that didn't mesh well with the rest of the work, and there were other moments which could have usefully been edited out from the near-hour's length. Indeed, like Gough's work, the numbers could have been stirred up and reordered without any loss, and at times only Tony Guilfoyle's inventive staging glued them together.

Maybe nothing in this programme is the future of opera, or even an iconoclastic alternative to opera, but it was a lot better than I'd expected (OK, feared), and taken on their own terms each piece had something to offer. It's also worth pointing out that this sort of work doesn't fit conveniently into either theatre or concert hall, so would probably never be seen if the Royal Opera House didn't get behind it. In its own way, and durability aside, that's perhaps more important than the umpteenth staging of Carmen.

 

LSO and Nitin Sawhney FREE concert tomorrow

Nitin Sawhney joins the LSO tomorrow (30 August) at 9pm in Trafalgar Square to perform a score written by Sawhney for Franz Osten's silent 1929 Indian cinema classic, A Throw of Dice (Prapancha Pash), which will be screened simultaneously.

Its **free**, just turn up.

Here's an extract:

Nitin Sawhney at the Proms

Prom 37: Nitin Sawhney and Friends - Royal Albert Hall, 10 August 2007

There are so many Proms I wanted to see in this second half of the season that I decided to buy an arena half-season ticket rather than bankrupt myself on seats. Although tonight's concert was sold out, the sensible limit on standing places meant there was plenty of room in the arena, even for those of us who needed to sit down and rest our heels from time to time.

The downside of standing is that unless you queue for hours to secure a place at the front, you can't actually see that much. It's OK if performers are standing, but of course the critical difference between classical and popular music is that classical is done sitting down. That meant I couldn't see much of tonight's orchestra, but it looked gigantic, maybe fifty strings just for starters. On top of that a raft of percussionists and keyboards and a long roster of singers stuffed the stage to bursting.

With these resources, Sawhney was able to present a much wider variety of sounds than he's normally able to in a live format. So we got to hear music from all stages of his career, including film scores and collaborations as well as work he's released on his solo albums.

The pieces that delved into his Indian and flamenco inspirations came across most strongly. Reena Bhardwaj's hauntingly beautiful performances of Nadia and Koyal shut up even the annoying couple who were chatting behind me for most of the concert. Natacha Atlas and Tina Grace were the vocal centre of a strong ten minute flamenco section.

One of the oddest and most effective pieces of programming came from the four scattered extracts from Zero Degrees, a dance work scored by Sawhney. Dancers Akram Khan and Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui sat on raised chairs and narrated the story of a trip-gone-wrong in perfect unison, both vocal and movement - a simple but compelling effect.

Everyone had been looking forward to the guest appearance of Anoushka Shankar and her sitar, and her newly-written collaboration with Sawhney, Charukeshi Rain was an inevitable highlight.

With 50-ish scores to his credit, Nitin Sawhney probably writes film music in his sleep (possibly the only time he's got with all the things he's up to). But the new work he presented for a Mira Nair film and a video game was imaginative and fully-realised.

His last number, the acoustic Prophesy, on an open-tuned guitar was a meditative contrast to the weight of the orchestral work, and paired with a graceful Kathak dance by an ankle-belled Akram Khan.

The whole thing is available on a Real stream from the BBC for the next week (with the sound mysteriously much cleaner than it was live).