Page 215 - Guildhall School Coverage Book 2020/21

done, and there were other similar more serious moments. But operatic farce is very tricky indeed,
and I am not sure whether Esbenshade and Lavender quite got the pace right all the time, but that
said I also wondered what it would be like to experience the opera in the smaller space for which it
was conceived, more intimate, more immediate. And certainly the whole delightfully cock-eyed
premise of this work made wonder what the two might do next.

Finally we had one of Charpentier's Orpheus operas. Orphée descendante aux enfers sees Orpheus
(Kieron-Connor Valentine) descending to Hell and encountering Tantalus (Chuma Sijeqa) and Ixion
(Thando Mjandana), and the scene ends with all expounding the power of love. Ramster made it work
in context by having the characters in Hell be those from the earlier operas so that Tantalus was the
General from the previous opera and so on. Kieron-Connor Valentine brought a light tenor and stylish
elegance to the haut-contre role of Orpheus, and even manage to make his cumbersome space-suit
work. All in all an engaging end to an intriguing evening.

Ramster's productions managed to create intriguing links between the works whilst giving each one its
own particular look and feel, and much credit should go to Louis Carver's flexible yet imaginative
designs. We began the entire evening with Kieron-Connor Valentine's Orpheus wandering around the
set, as if everything we saw was an evocation of these jours en enfers, and in the final new opera the
duet by the two cleaning ladies vying with each other to be the genuine one had real echoes of the
two women in the Carissimi, especially as the same singers were involved.

All the singers impressed both with the way that they embraced the various styles of the operas and
for the way individual singers popped up in such a wide variety of roles so that for instance Laura
Lolita Peresivana was in four of the five operas whilst Olivia Boen and Chuma Sijeqa were in three
each. *

The operas will be available as live-streams on 1, 3, and 7 June at 7 pm, see the Guildhall School's
website for details.