Page 195 - ASMF Marriner 100 Coverage Book

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.