As a scenario for a chamber opera, try this: two women of “ripe but well-cared-for middle age” (an enviable condition) reminisce as old friends but soon reveal themselves bitter rivals, each harbouring a shocking secret. Edith Wharton’s featherlight short story Roman Fever (1934) can nearly be lifted straight from the page to make a crisp two-hander libretto. The American composer Philip Hagemann (b.1932) did just that in his 1989 opera, set to lush, singable, musical theatre-style music. Wharton’s words remain intact, the levity of the conversation exposed as bitchiness exemplified.
Roman Fever was presented as part of a stylish double bill with Francis Poulenc’s La voix humaine (sung in English as The Human Voice) by Pegasus Opera, directed by Josette Bushell-Mingo and conducted by Rebecca Tong. Both shows were designed, with elegant economy, by Peiyao Wang. Pegasus’s credo, since its foundation in 1992, has been to provide opportunities “for artists from African and Asian heritage, promoting opera among people of all ages in underserved and culturally diverse communities”. In choice of repertoire, this open-minded company prefers the universal to proselytism. The two works here, based on texts by canonical writers (in Poulenc’s case, Jean Cocteau), plead no case except to explore the human condition.
A majority female production team and orchestra match the theme of the double bill, but this is treated as an opportunity rather than a condition. Many of the young and efficient production team were from the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama. Pegasus now has a forward-looking partnership with Glyndebourne involving mentoring and masterclasses. In classic Wharton style, the two widows, sung by the soprano Alison Buchanan and the mezzo-soprano Bernadine Pritchett, are women of leisure. All is revealed in the opera’s last, climactic bars. As Alida, acid-tongued and glamorous, Pritchett was alluring, wry, diction clear. Buchanan, who is also artistic director of Pegasus, has an operatic fullness to her voice, well suited to the apparently dowdy Grace.
After this comedy came Poulenc’s intense monodrama in which a woman, Elle, pours her suicidal emotion into a phone call. The lyric soprano Nadine Benjamin, now a star name in British opera, balanced excess and restraint, even allowing glints of humour amid the darkness. She held her audience spellbound – an audience as comfortably diverse as many a UK city street. How is that mix achieved? Given the paucity of audience information in the recent Arts Council England Let’s Create survey, the question is worth asking. A Pegasus spokesperson summed it up as years of building up mailing lists and writing to general opera lovers as well as targeting black events, organisations and individuals, plus group leaders and bookers. Hard work, but not mysterious. Pegasus’s double bill, given three performances, may look like a small event. On the contrary, it is a catalyst for change.
That happened to be the title – Catalyst – of the National Youth Orchestra’s spring season concerts with the National Youth Brass Band of Great Britain, which took place in Liverpool and London. The sight of multitudes of strings, wind, brass is always a thrill. The addition of a superb young brass band was another matter. Conducted by Tess Jackson, one-time NYO violinist and a Classic FM “rising star”, these teenage players made light work of Gavin Higgins’s Concerto Grosso for Brass Band and Orchestra.
A storming showpiece first heard at the 2022 Proms, fiendishly difficult, full or bravura as well as poetry, the work has a prominent part for solo cornet. It was played, faultlessly, by Lewis Barton, 18, from Wigan. He falls into the prized category of “ridiculously talented”. The NYO then played Prokofiev’s explosive and demanding Symphony No 5, conducted by Jessica Cottis. Long accused of being a private school bastion, the NYO now draws 50% of its players from the state scector. That may not reflect national percentages, but even to get to this point, given the diminution of music education, has taken hard graft over a decade or more, and cannot be underestimated.
All last week, celebrations honoured the memory of the visionary conductor Neville Marriner, to mark the centenary of his birth and the work of the ensemble he founded, the Academy of St Martin in the Fields. The concert, given on the birthday itself, last Monday, and broadcast live on Radio 3, was shared between conductors and directors, players moving around to share the limelight. The short, spirited Parade by Errollyn Wallen, a world premiere, was equally democratic. Works by Vaughan Williams and Handel, and Part I of Haydn’s Creation, played and sung with irresistible verve by the Academy chorus, Sarah-Jane Brandon, Benjamin Hulett and Matthew Rose, made you glad to be alive. Mozart’s Symphony No 25 in G minor, led with massive attack by the Academy’s violinist-director, Joshua Bell, seemed to express the essence of life itself, in all its zest, sweat, fury, lyricism, joy. Hard to think the symphony is sometimes referred to as “little”. This performance had the energy to power the National Grid for a day, at the very least.
Star ratings (out of five)
Roman Fever/ The Human Voice ★★★★
NYO, National Youth Brass Band of Great Britain ★★★★
Celebrating Sir Neville Marriner ★★★★★
Celebrating Sir Neville Marriner is on BBC Sounds
