Dreamlives: A Freudian Fantasy

Published Tuesday 28 August 2007 at 18:40 by David Gutman

The Tete a Tete Opera Festival, 18 days of new music drama for modest resources, is the brainchild of director Bill Bankes-Jones.

Programmes are organised into bite-sized chunks. Typically the starter might be a work in progress, the main course a fully furbished professional premiere, the afters a jamming session or cabaret.

The last programme of the season offers a starter as intriguing as the main event. In The Fear of Roderick Usher Andrew Leveson interweaves Debussy’s sketches for his never completed Edgar Allan Poe opera with portions of the declining composer’s diaries and correspondence. While the sensibility is post-modern, only the final resort to the familiar strains of Clair de Lune strikes a false note.

The main course is a slicker presentation through which Liederkreis intends to make a dramatic intervention into the staid world of the recital room.

Again the staging is spare with minimal props - the piano, a screen, a trunk, a dead husband’s coat, some roses - all evocatively lit. Not that the tension between the traditional song recital and a theatrical enactment of Freudian regression is easily resolved. We’re given song texts in English which cannot be read in the gloom. And is the selection of only early material by Berg and Schoenberg alongside Richard Strauss really bold enough to explore the protagonist’s darkest fantasies of suicide, death and sexual promiscuity?

Set beside the filmed experiments of soprano Christine Schafer and director Oliver Herrmann, this show feels tame. What atmosphere there is owes a great deal to Sergey Rybin’s ultra-sensitive accompaniments.