Blind Date

Published Monday 19 November 2007 at 11:45 by David Gutman

The progeny of speed-dated librettists and composers as workshopped at Tete a Tete’s inaugural opera festival last August, Blind Date emerges now as polished full-length entertainment. Its six components, expertly projected by singers, ensemble and musical director Tim Murray are economically but memorably presented on a sparsely furnished open stage suffused with red light.

The most finished pieces musically come at either end of the evening. Julian Grant and Meredith Oakes’ Anger, originally conceived as a private joke for ENO management, offers a sustained parody of opera composers and self-important opera critics. With Nyanyushka, Gary Carpenter and Simon Nicholson take a sideways look at Stalinism and Lactophilia via music indebted to Stravinsky’s A Soldier’s Tale. Diverse if generally shorter-breathed postmodern invention predominates elsewhere with extensive use of rhyming couplets for comic effect.

The most user-friendly turn is the vaudevillian The Feathered Friend, Helen Chadwick and Alastair Middleton’s man-woman-parrot love triangle in which soprano Stephanie Corley doubles as puppeteer.

The most inscrutable is On Such a Day, in which big name writer Philip Ridley pairs with Anna Meredith for a scene without protagonists or action. Three onstage computer-screens project faces whose changing expressions reflect the shifting emotions of offstage voices.

Canadian composer Chris Mayo and Christopher Crebolder try hardest with Houses, the chronicle of three Toronto homes, interweaving taped narration, live performance, packing case props, past, present and future. The result is surprisingly evocative.

Artistically uneven as it must be, the evening is a feather in the cap of artistic director Bill Bankes-Jones. It may or may not be opera, but even the programme booklet displays a certain flair.