(tickets on request)
Five:15 16th-17th August, Riverside Studios
(£12.50)
In the not so distant past, Ian Rankin was just your average opera philistine. Then, on his 40th birthday, Inspector Rebus's creator went to La Bohème. Seven years later, he has immersed himself in 15 more operas—the latest one of his own creation. Rankin wrote the libretto for a "mini-opera," Gesualdo, mounted in Scottish Opera's recent production Five:15, which arrives in London this August—five operas, each pairing a prominent writer and composer, each running a mere 15 minutes (Dream Argus from Five:15 is pictured, below right). Rankin's partner was Craig Armstrong, who scored the movies Romeo+Juliet and Moulin Rouge, and who has worked with Madonna and Massive Attack. "We thought, '15 minutes, how hard can it be?'" Rankin reminisced on the eve of a sold-out opening night in Glasgow. "Of course, the answer was, 'Pretty bloody hard!'" The word "opera," after all, is the plural of the Latin opus, meaning "work" or "labour."
My first and only experience of mini-opera, as yet, has been among the audience of a recent collaboration between AOP and the Royal Opera House (ROH)—an adaptation of Joseph Conrad's novella Heart of Darkness. I've seen it several times, and in various incarnations: in public workshop performances, rehearsals, closed-door back-of-the-house debriefings, in New York City and Princeton, New Jersey. Now, the final session of workshops will run at ROH's Linbury Studio in the first week of August, with full production slated for 2009.
Heart of Darkness, the opera, comprises one act of 24 scenes, running an hour and 14 minutes, without intermission. The libretto is by Tom Phillips, author of the illustrated book A Humument. The music is by composer Tarik O'Regan, "fellow commoner" in the creative arts at Trinity College, Cambridge, and two-time British Composer award-winner. Before the maestros raised the curtain in New York, they encouraged their audience to watch and listen with a critic's senses. "If you fall asleep for ten minutes, please tell us where," O'Regan advised. "If you fall asleep for an hour, don't bother."
Mini, or chamber, operas, are miniature in terms of reduced instrumental force, or reduced time scale. The earliest ancestor of the form is Benjamin Britten's The Rape of Lucretia, invented by the composer in the 1940s to accommodate the English Opera Group's desire for works that could easily be toured and mounted in small spaces. "There are very practical social and economic aspects that explain why chamber opera is now so common and full-scale opera so rare," noted John Lloyd Davies, head of opera development at ROH2, an offshoot of ROH, who is trying to work out what the future of opera looks like. One reason, he explained, is that while the stage technicians, the chorus and the orchestra nowadays have bigger salaries, the audiences and backers are comparatively poorer. "Opera is so hard to get right—and nobody wants to risk huge sums of money."
Ian Rankin, anticipating his Gesualdo's Glasgow debut, found the live component a little nerve-wracking. "It gets the adrenaline going," he said. "When you write a book, it's published and it's read, but the reaction you get from readers is at one remove. This is going to be very immediate." O'Regan, meanwhile, is absorbing feedback on Heart of Darkness from both the London and American workshops. In America, the reviews were mixed. "Too dark!" moaned one member of the audience at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. "If you want happy, go see Mamma Mia!" suggested Dvorit Samid, a member of Princeton Friends of Opera.
At a reception following the Brooklyn performance of Heart of Darkness, Oliver Gooch, the ROH conductor who flew over for the performance, was satisfied, if a bit unnerved. The tempo had galloped away with him when little things started to go wrong and his pulse started racing. "The heart is my metronome," he explained, flushed and tapping his chest. Despite the unintentional allegro, O'Regan worried that the ending dragged when it should have unfurled. Even the librettist, exhausted by his labours, nodded off for a few bars around scene 22. "I'll fix it," said O'Regan, adding, after a beat, "with scissors."
