Platterback, story and lyrics by Kate Westbrook, music by Mike Westbrook

Kate Westbrook, John Winfield, Karen Street (accordion), Stanley Adler
(cello), Mike Westbrook (piano, tuba)

Part of the Battersea Arts Centre's music theatre season, A sharp intake of
music.

Platterback is effectively a song cycle for two voices, with instruments
and backing voices. The songs are organized as a train journey from
Stiltsville, a rural town in the mountains, to Platterback, a city on the
plain with all that that implies.

The two main singers are a young man (John Winfield) headed for military
service and close to despair at leaving his girlfriend and the countryside,
and a cook (Kate Westbrook) who works for the British ambassador and loves
the city. Winfield gave an easy-listening performance, not helped by some
of the arrangements and the amplification. He had an appealing falsetto and
some expressive moments. Westbrook managed a wide range of
characterizations, somewhere on the Dietrich-Lenya-Mercouri axis vocally,
with a fair bit of music-theatre skill but not really a lot of oomph.

The instumentalists and their instruments represent other travellers. The
cello and the cellist are between them a card sharp who is dodging the
draft, and the accordion (with a few words from the player) is a poet. This
information is on the liner of a CD of this work, which I looked at briefly
-- it wasn't completely obvious from the peformance who the minor
characters were, and I can't remember and couldn't work out who the
piano/tuba player is supposed to be.

The songs are in a range of broadly popular traditional styles, mainly
American, with a strong emphasis on jazz and cabaret or music hall. (The
Westbrooks and their company perform mainly on the jazz circuit, and they
have recorded a CD of Hollaender songs.) The songs are generally pretty
good of their kind, and make an enjoyable mixed main-stream program apart
from the frame narrative. Boiled beef is a comic turn by the cook, mixing
burlesque innuendo and some fairly complex satire about food and
conservatism. My sum and substance is a moving rework of Black is the color
of my true love's hair, with a similar ambiguity between folk song and
blues in the music and slightly more "literary" words. The Stiltsville
yodel is a borderline parodic western song about a country fair, with lots
of animal noises.

There are some spoken linking passages, some bridging medleys of
recapituled lines, and a couple of characterizing instrumental sections
which are the most original part of the work. The cello (an electric
instrument, apparently with a regular soundbox without the f-holes)
produces some amazing sounds, evoking a flashy, unreliable onlooker as well
as the redneck excitement of the fair. Stanley Adler plays it like a bass,
and like a fiddle, as well as like a classical string instrument. He also
uses it as percussion, and sings while playing, alarmingly given what the
playing position does to your posture. The accordion is gentle and lyric as
the poet. The character seems to be a very quiet young woman who reacts
reflectively but indecisively, and Karen Street didn't make much impact,
though she was a soothing presence.

The whole work is literate, poetic and old-fashioned, in a rather
comforting way.  The lyrics, in spite of some clunky lines, would probably
work as a poetry book, and the overall themes are those of classical satire
and pastoral, that is, city versus country, ambition and contentment, war
and peace. It isn't at all surprising when the piano player quotes "medio
tutissimus ibis" and names Ovid in a transition passage after a debate
about whether country or city is better. Horace's town mouse and country
mouse, the satires in general, plus Juvenal, would be even closer.

I'm not sure who the target audience for this sort of work is. I enjoyed
it, but I'm not sure I would have gone to see it based on a description or
synopsis. I actually went mainly because BAC is a Good Thing, and because
it sounded a bit like Mahagonny, which it isn't really at all. The
reflection on war and urban blight is melancholy rather than bitter, and
the final departure from Platterback is open rather than hopeless.

BTW, Andrew Porter's review of The golden ass is in this week's TLS. He is
quite positive (I think), and doesn't comment on the stucture or pace of
the libretto at all. He compares the music world of Peters' score to
Puccini's Rondine and late Strauss. I'm not sure if this is praise, or a
polite way of saying that it's derivative. I had a similar ambivalence
about Platterback. It's musically like a lot of good things, or at least
things that I enjoy, but I'm not sure whether being like is enough.

Aristotle, of course, spent several pages asking whether (as it were) the
fact that Lloyd Webber is like Puccini means that another composer who is
like Puccini is like Lloyd Webber. Mathematicians and metaphysicians have
different answers to that one.