Love
"Inspired by the words of WB Yeats"

Composed by Ben Park, Directed by Roxanna Silbert and Tom Morris

Steve Antee (cello), Fiona Bryan (bassoon), Steve Gibson (marimba), Sam
Kenyon (vocals), Alice Kinloch (trombone), Francine Luce (vocals)

Park Music


Tourette's Diva

"unsuitable for children and adults of all ages"

Lucy Stevens (mezzo), Richard Thomas (piano etc)

Kombat Opera

Ben Park's Love, a work in progress, is a song cycle that uses fragments of
Yeat's poetry in a sort of Propertian spin of Krapp's Last Tape. A prologue
setting of lines from The lamentation of the old pensioner introduces a
look back in senility at the course of the poet's unconsumated love for an
unnamed woman, from youthful hope through middle-aged cynicism to a belated
attempt to mourn and move on.

The music, composed in this version for low instruments, high male and
indeterminate female voice, is in a literate pop idiom -- think Elvis
Costello and his epigoni -- that seems initially too close to easy
listening for the bitter humour of the text but which gets well inside the
shape and dynamics of the text. The vocal lines sometimes acted out the
interaction between the poet and his beloved in the music, in dialogues or
failures to engage, and sometimes performed more abstract, but more
intimate, counterpoint. On first hearing, it was tempting to think that it
is all not as simple as it seems, but if it is, it is still highly
enjoyable if conventional music.

Sam Kenyon, who looks a bit like Ian Bostridge, and Francine Luce also
acted out the drama in an abstract way in the space of the studio, looking
into each other's eyes or singing at each other across the band for
example. They were still getting to grips with the music, but found a fair
theatrical frisson in it. There's definitely some potential for theatre in
this material. Apart from anything else, Yeats' poetry has so much ritual
and rhetoric in it that it demands to be done out loud, by characters. But
a passing similarity with Janacek's Diary of one who disappeared, from
which Deborah Warner made a decidedly under-strength theatrical piece,
makes me wonder whether the drama might not be better done in visual
effects. Or maybe just by the poet alone with his tape recorder.

Richard Thomas' Tourette's Drama is  song cycle that in one sense is
nothing but performance invented by the audience. Thomas pinpoints the
exact point at which the physical extremes at which a committed singer
works turn into physical and mental disarray. A diva's entirely plausible
bravura runs and sharp changes of mood turn out to be outburst of obscenity
and inconsequence. Some of the words seem to be based on found texts or
transcriptions of real Touretters, and the apparently conventional music
drives them along with a compulsion that might be pleasurable or might be
extremely dangerous. There's a superficial similarity with Maxwell Davies'
The medium, also a woman singing in extremis, but Thomas seems interested
in the performance for its own sake, by a human but skimming around
humanity, not like Max in an underlying narrative with moral meaning.

Interestingly, the cycle seems to have a quasi-symphonic structure. The
first section states the themes of control (an Anglican setting of the
Lord's prayer) and derangement (an extravagantly obscene outburst) then
develops them into each other in a generally nineteenth-century operatic
style. The second section does nineteenth-century opera again, in larger
chunks, including a hilarious dream-like "Lesbian breakfast". The third
section does Cole Porter or the Gershwins, maybe Weill and Sondheim, with
more emphasis on pure (or totally obscene) glossolalia. The fourth section,
blackest in tone, merges musical-hall and popular styles with those of the
previous sections and dwells on death and profound alienation ("Before you
cremate me, make sure I'm dead").

Lucy Stevens gave a demented performance in every sense, working and
scaring the audience as well as delivering the complexities of the music.
She looks, and sings, like a proper diva at the expensive, ladylike end of
the market, but her outbursts of filth were totally convincing too.

There were more conventioanl interludes between the song sets, an amusingly
gross super-model in a leather catsuit and a man in a suit doing balletic
things to a sung text taken from the label of a Corby Trouser press.