Page 217 - Guildhall Coverage Book 2020-21

30 May 2021

Full of contrasts and dramatic cogency - Beginnings: New and Early Opera at
the Guildhall School
Labels: opera review

Beginnings: New and Early Opera - Crankshaw
& Best, Carissimi, O'Grady & Sullivan,
Esbenshade & Lavender; Charpentier;
Guildhall School of Music and Drama
Reviewed by Robert Hugill on 28 May 2021
Three new operas, created by students,
and two very early operatic scenes in a
striking and varied evening at the
Guildhall School

Each academic year, the Guildhall School of Music and Drama's MA in Opera Making &
Writing programme culminates in short new chamber operas, written by composers and
librettists on the course and then staged in collaboration with the Guildhall School's
Opera Course. Inevitably, the 2019/20 course was not quite the same, and the
culmination was a partially filmed performance with everyone in isolation. The new
operas from the Opera Makers finally reached the stage when the Guildhall School
staged them as part of a quadruple bill.

On Friday night (28 May 2021) I was lucky enough to catch Beginnings: New and Early
Opera at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama's Silk Street Theatre, with the stage
premieres of The Apothecary (composer Amy Crankshaw, librettist Clare
Best), Eintänzer (composer Aran O'Grady, librettist Kaitlin Sullivan) and I'm Cleaning,
I'm Cleaning (composer Abel Esbenshade, librettist Aubrey Lavender), plus
Carissimi's Judicium Salomonis and Charpentier's Orphée descendante aux enfers,
directed by John Ramster, conducted by Chad Kelly, with designs by Louis Carver,
lighting by Jake Wiltshire and movement from Victoria Newlyn.

The three new operas, perhaps written with a a rather smaller space within the Guildhall School in
mind, used its largest theatre for these performances to allow for social distancing. Thus the
productions had to some extent expand the operas to fill the space, which they did admirably but
there were moments where I wished we had been in a more intimate space with the ability of the
singers to get the words over more. But all the performances were superbly engaged and engaging,
these were confident expositions of three very talented works and I certainly look forward to what the
composers and librettists get up to next. Whilst not all three composers wrote tunes as such, all three
operas had singable vocal lines, these seemed to be singer friendly and expressive (two things which
don't always happen in new opera). Each composer took an imaginatively different approach to the
craft of making an opera, ensuring it is performable whilst keeping the elements of their style.