United Kingdom Edward Lambert, The Burning Question: The Music Troupe, Elspeth Wilkes and Stephen Westrop (piano duet). King’s Head Theatre, London, 18.2.2023. (MB)
Production:
Designs – Tabita Benton-Evans
Direction, Movement – Jenny Weston
Cast:
Arianna – Louise Fuller
The Pope – Arlene Belli
Ignacio – Harry Grigg
San Pietro – Samuel Lom
Heavenly Voices – Rosalind Dobson, Arlene Belli, Peter Martin, Samuel Lom
Two operas in someday: it occurs (for a choose, maybe insane, few of us) occasionally, however one most likely needs them to be fairly contrasted, no less than except they’re meant to be carried out collectively. In that sense, Edward Lambert’s new chamber opera, his seventeenth, provided a pleasant amuse-bouche – and greater than that, however not an excessive amount of – to the primary evening of English National Opera’s new manufacturing of Das Rheingold, a shortish bus-ride away from Islington’s King’s Head Theatre.
Inspired by a 2019 incident through which Pope Francis was delayed by twenty-five minutes from assembly the trustworthy in St Peter’s Square, discovering himself caught in a raise and finally rescued by firefighters, this ‘comedy in song’, largely in English however with a bit Italian, in addition to liturgical Latin, flippantly performs with the vacation spot of a soul. It appears that she has carried out good work in cleansing up the Church, so is destined to do the identical for Hell/Hades, although her valet (a demon, Ignacio) worries about how his father there’ll react to a lady’s management. Petrine Security’s go to finally resolves the matter, as, in recounting a youthful lustful sin, the Pope tells of the kid she had had with Persephone, underworld goddess, left within the care of nuns in Woking. That baby is Ignacio. Rather than revert to semi-divine standing, each he and the angel-chambermaid Arianna resolve to construct a life collectively on earth, the sparks of their love firing the purgatorial fireplace that may cleanse the Pope and allow her to enter Heaven in spite of everything.
To a libretto by Norman Welch and Edward Lambert, which contains not solely the Latin Requiem Mass but additionally materials by Ambrose Bierce, the opera performs out in what’s much less a parade of types — that makes it sound arbitrary — then freely floating, basically tonal, numbers that evoke a vaudeville spirit, theological-dramatic passage, and benign hauntings from the historical past of the style. There are set-pieces, speech, passages of parlando connection, and sound design from, because it have been, past the past, heavenly voices working their recorded but fast magic. Much although not all, is underpinned by glorious piano duet work from Elspeth Wilkes and Stephen Westrop. Coloratura ornaments, and finally sincerity of affection wins, winningly expressed by soprano Louise Fuller and Harry Grigg, ably mentored by Arlene Belli’s Pope and Samuel Lom’s St Peter. Simple, but undeniably highly effective choreography and shifts of lighting make essential contributions too. This, then, is an actual firm, totally skilled, affair from The Music Troupe, which may and perhaps ought to provoke deeper ideas, but which may additionally definitely be loved as a bit of enjoyable on the floor. As Nietzsche (posthumously) reminded Wagner, not all artwork want or needs to be the Stone Guest scene; typically, il faut méditeranniser la musique.
Mark Berry