Venus and Adonis (Alessandro Scarlatti)

Venus    David D.Q. Lee
Adonis   Jennie Such

Director Kate Hutchinson

Modern Baroque Opera

Ex "a Martini opera" music by Ross Lorraine, words and lyrics by Rob Young

Ruby     Catherine Digges
Jack     Ben Fox

Piano    David Owen

Director Lisa Goldman

No music director is credited for Venus and Adonis, though there was a
harpsichord player, also uncredited. Ross Lorraine is music director for
Ex.

BAC Opera 99 opened with a very early work and a brand new one that both
consisted of a heterosexual couple lamenting, separately, each other's
failings and the impossibility of love, then finally joining in a wistful
duet.

Scarlatti's Venus and Adonis is full of beautiful music, but deeply
conventional in plot (such as it is) -- she warns him not to go hunting and
to stay with her, he goes anyway, and they sing a final duet knowing that
he is doomed. The programme note says that this production is set on the
night of Adonis' first yearly return to earth (like Tammuz) after his
death, which helps capture the mixture of hope and the certainty of loss in
the story and music.

There's not really much evidence of this concept in the actual performance,
excepe perhaps a dreamlike atmosphere. The set consists of giant roses with
barbed-wire stems twisted arounk like the Sleeping Beauty's forest of
thorns, and a stream made of broken mirrors. The singers are always on
opposite sides of the stream and struggle through the thorns to reach each
other, until the end. In a variant on the exit aria, they like down and
have a nap after singing, which makes it a bit static and inconsequential
at times.

The main divergence from convention in this production is that Venus is
sung by a counter tenor and Adonis by a soprano. This didn't turn out to
make any striking points about gender, as we're fairly used to soprano
heroes, and David Lee looked beautiful and ambivalent enough not to push
the envelope much. Both work "classical" costumes that would roughly do for
either sex. Musically also it make remarkably little difference. David Lee
has a mezzo voice that worked fine with Jennie Such's soprano in the duet.

It's difficult to judge voices in the BAC main auditorium, which was
designed to flatter the rhetorical orotundies of Battersea aldermen of
bygone years, and I can't really guess how big David Lee's voice is. But
after a few unfocussed moments at the start, he sounded lovely, with a full
lower register and agile top. Jennie Such certainly has a bigger voice, but
she is clearly at home in this repertoire.

Maybe it was a bad idea starting the season on Friday 13. The production
was advertised as being "in Italian with English text incorporated into the
set". The English turned out to be on slides, in the wrong colour and
projected too dimly to see but accompanied by irritating squeaks from the
lighting box while they were changed. And road surfacing work started on
Lavender Hill, about ten yards from the back of the auditorium, half an
hour in. The singers and players were impressively unfazed, but some of the
audience got decidedly restive.

Ex was altogether more straightforward. A couple who used to be lovers meet
in a bar, realise that they still love each other but couldn't get back
together because she's moved on, and about to leave the country with her
ner lover, and part wistfully. The characters' poses and imaginings are
represented as popular songs in various genres, neatly done with funny
words, but not partcularly memorable on the whole. One song did catch
exactly the awful moment when you realise both that someone is a complete
prat and that you're going to sleep with him or her.

In fact, the whole thing was like a John Godber play with songs. It has an
urban, socially mobile working-class woman and a man behaving badly, and
some painfully accurate observation that is also already the stuff of
standup comedy and jokes going around by email. Quite amusing and sometimes
moving, but too dependent on gender stereotypes to provoke any new thoughts
at all.

Catherine Digges and Ben Fox were very funny and sympathetic as the exes
Ruby and Jack. They handled the fairly wide range of musical styles
adeptly.