Scottish Opera once again offers an evening of pint-sized operas as the culmination of a commissioning process that sees five composers paired with five librettists to produce new work each lasting 15 minutes. This is the third and apparently final year in which this format has been followed. The results are a shining showcase for composers of new work in Scotland. This year’s batch began with Zen Story, which captured the concept of the opera miniature perfectly.

Indeed, of all the five stories presented this year, this one fitted its time-limited skin with far greater grace than the others on offer. The genius of the piece was the realisation that the format was the perfect vehicle for an eastern, minimalist, mystical experience. Miriama Young’s score was a suitably sparse carrier of Alan Spence’s libretto in which the words were so carefully chosen that narrative gave way to parable and the busy world was hushed for a while. Singing honours for Zen Story lay unquestionably with bass Dean Robinson as Hakuin the holy man. He brought a calm and refined dignity to a part which was utterly in contrast to the shame of the Girl (Miranda Sinani) who confesses that she is pregnant to Father (Jeremy Huw Williams) and Mother (Louise Collett). Shame is the repeating theme as firstly she falsely accuses Hakuin of being the father and falls even further when she admits to having lied all along. Two solo piano chords brought this thoughtful piece to a calm and peaceful end.

The prescribed Five:15 format demands that all the operas are performed on an ingenious doughnut shaped stage – the orchestra sitting in the hole in the middle. It took no time at all for Haikun’s cushion to be swept away and the stage set with a rather frightening treelike figure in the form of a non-speaking and non-singing Kally Lloyd-Jones . This piece was a sharp and spiky meditation on the nature of dark memories. This began as a dialogue between a woman (Lee Bissett) and her Sister (Miranda Sinani). The memory of an assault years before was the subject matter. Despite the Sister’s best efforts to keep the woman focussed on the future and in particular her son, dark thoughts won the day as the woman appeared to be sucked into a mystical landscape embodied by the tree. The brooding nature of the score by Nick Fells was enhanced with an electro-acoustic soundscape which surrounded the admirable work of the orchestra. This piece was essentially a dialogue about pain – on the one hand the mental trauma of living with the memory of a sexual assault and on the other the pain of watching a sister unable to climb out of her terrors.

Perhaps the most disappointing piece of the evening came next. This departed from the central format a little, being the first three scenes of what is intended to be a longer piece. It was also the longest piece of the evening, nudging away any expectation that this would merely last fifteen minutes. The subject matter of The Money Man was the greedy expectations of a bunch of seemingly cartoon characters facing ruin in the recent  recession. They were not a group of people that one could feel a great deal of sympathy for. Martin Lamb worked very hard as Tom Masters, the loud and obnoxious money man of the title. There was comedy here but set within the context of a great deal of shouting. There were some interesting musical effects, particularly a falling sneer in the strings at every mention of the name of Masters’s daughter Laura (Arlene Rolph). Alexander Grove’s singing as Steve one of Masters’s minions was rewarding, as was the comic timing of Louise Collett as Jenna, a gold-digging journalist. However the sum of the piece was considerably less than its parts. It may be that composer Lyell Cresswell and librettist Rob Butlin can find necessary changes of pace and style if they are really going to work this up into a much longer piece. Within the context of an evening of fifteen minute set pieces, it stuck out like a sore thumb.

After the interval, next up was Paul Mealor’s ghost story 74° North. Once again, electro-acoustic effects supplemented the sounds of the orchestra. However the use of amplified sound did not stop there. Early on in the piece, the voice of the Stranger (Alexander Grove) was taken up and amplified on the speakers on either side of the stage. The ethereal oddity of this sound set the scene for a spooky, icy tale set in the frozen north of Canada. An explorer (Jeremy Huw Williams) comes across a stranger and only gradually realises that he has encountered one of the explorers of an earlier age, whose story had in fact drawn him into his own career. Williams presented some of the most accomplished singing of the evening; by turn tortured and frightened by what he has encountered in this lonely spot.

The finale of the evening was The Letter. A busy stage was suddenly full of singers, all of whom had already appeared in the other works. A liturgical Sch’ma at the beginning and the end framed the piece and announced its setting within the Jewish experience of Nazi occupied Ukraine. The direction by Irina Brown was the most accomplished that we had seen all evening. Stories were rapidly told as much by movement as by singing. This was also the most conventional orchestral writing though ridden by cliché, as though the composer Vitaly Khodosh had simply tried to sound like other Russians rather than finding his own voice. The conceit here is that a Jewish woman is writing a letter to her son whom she knows she will never see again. Alene Rolph’s Anna Seyonovna found genuine pathos amidst a certain amount of melancholy. The end of this piece, as each character set fire to their own yellow star, was the equal of any number of guillotined nuns or consumptive divas of the established repertoire. Genuinely moving, painful to watch and designed to recur in the mind long after the applause had ended.

This year’s set of fifteen minute operas seem destined to be the last such evening, at least for a while. New works will be commissioned by Scottish Opera next year but are expected to be between 45 and 60 minutes with the company working its way up to a fully staged, full length opera in a few years’ time. However, Five:15 has proved itself to be more than merely a set of building blocks towards that ultimate goal. The opera miniatures approach makes for an interesting evening in its own right. One need never worry too much that one is not enjoying the show. For most of the evening, if one is not appreciating what is going on, one must simply wait, sure in the knowledge that there will be another one along in a quarter of an hour or so. Indeed, in our impatient, restless, channel-flicking modernity this format might itself, in fact, be the future.




Kelvin Holdsworth
Opera Britannia