Stone angels, music by Paul Barker, written by Chris Baldwin

New London Children's Choir
Lontano


Conductor   Odaline de la Martinez
Director    Chris Baldwin
Designer    Haibo Yu

This new opera is, written for girls' voices and about forty five minutes
long, seems to be intended for school or youth-group production. But the
programme claims that it's a real opera about children and violence, and it
certainly covers some big and dangerous themes.

During a war, a plane has crashed on an island. A number of schoolgirls
have survived. At the start of the opera, a group calling themselves the
Stoners attack and kill (with stones) another girl, who they call a Glook.
Two other girls look on. One of them, who calls herself Sleepy, doesn't
quite know where she is or what is going on, and assumes that the murdered
girl was a monster. The Glooks turn out to be non-Stoners who huddle
together and try to attract attention from passing ships and planes while
the Stoners stomp around and kill them. A plane drops pornongraphy (because
the pilots assume that the girls are soldiers), and the violence becomes
worse until the Stoners kill all the Glooks except Sleepy. She stands up to
them, and the group splits, with half of them joining her as a new lot of
Glooks. I couldn't work out whether it was significant they were probably
about to be rescued at the end.

The situation recalls Lord of the Flies. The obvious point about war being
a process of dividing humanity into two and dumping on the half you're not
in is there. But there's less about the power politics of personality and
more about different kinds of groups. The Stoners have football hooligan
chants and bang stones together, the Glooks have lyrical melodies. Both
groups repeat their words and music frequently, perhaps suggesting that,in
the extreme circumstances they are in, the Glooks have a habit of
victimhood just as the Stoners have a habit of violence. (Teenage girls
forming groups of blokes and soppy girlies is actually quite realistic, but
I don't think this is specifically about that.)

In addition, and harder to pin down, there's an ambiguity as to whether the
girls are Odysseus, trying to get off the island, or Sirens luring their
rescuers (and the audience) into prurient danger. The Glooks sing the Greek
text of the Sirens' song from the Odyssey (it says here, I thought it was
from some scholiast, but I don't have a text to check). The Stoners at one
point sing a passage from the Sirens episode in Ulysses, in which Mr Bloom
masturbates as he watches Gertie and friends barefoot on the seashore. I
think the point is that the girls do what they do as a result of the
violence that they experience -- they either just have to pass it along or
they try to form a community that ignores it.

This is interesting and potentially powerful stuff. The music is often
striking, though not inherently visceral. Performed by violin, cello,
flute, clarinet and marimba, with the wind players doubling on bass flute
and bass clarinet, it forms a melodramatic background to rhythmic speech
much of the time, with some densely composed accompaniment to choral
passages and a couple of duets. The instrumental playing, conducted by
Odaline de la Marinez, was excellent, very precise and muscular. The solo
singers were underpowered for the Bloomsbury theatre, which I think was a
problem with the theatre as much as the composition, though I'm not sure
that a treble voice has much chance against a bass clarinet.

The set was also striking. Against a black background, the plane fusilage
was stylized to look like a white Greek island house. A white area on the
backdrop was a similar shape, upside down, and was used to project images
of war planes. The costumes were ripped school uniforms, a touch of St
Trinians (supplied by Bentalls...).

Somehow this performance didn't quite deliver the horror it should have.
The rhythmic aggression in the music worked quite well, but the actual acts
of violence were stylized out of existence. The performers were clearly
cast for their singing, which was fine, particularly in the choral parts. A
drama workshop might well deliver a lot more. A related problem was that
the leader of the Stoners definitely looked more like a supermodel done up
postmodern primitive than the leader of the pack, and also lacked vocal
aggression.

A short opera for a lot of female voices is a useful thing, and this one
has potential.