Love List:
Chamber Opera by Jack Symonds

“It was a pleasure to stage this strange, beautiful song cycle/pocket opera by Leoš Janáček at the Opera House. A titan of grand opera in the first half of the 20th century, Janáček’s extraordinary music and sense of time is still enormously influential with composers today. Diary of One Who Disappeared is a small-scale work that perfectly exemplifies what SCO loves to do.”

“Benjamin Britten’s Lucretia is arguably the first true ‘chamber opera’ in the sense that all the voices and small instrumental ensemble are treated as genuine chamber music - like a string quartet capable of all the intensity and range of much larger operas. SCO staged it in 2017 and this beautiful and tragic scene is achieved with only two singers, cor anglais and string quintet.”

“More Britten, and another remarkable, economical scene from The Turn of the Screw with an ensemble cast and the accompaniment often reduced to a virtuoso tubular bells part! This is the opera that made SCO want to master and specialise in this repertoire.”

“Henze was another dominant opera composer in the second half of the 20th century, and Elegy for Young Lovers is a chamber piece of rarefied beauty and translucent sound. This aria sits at its cold heart.”

“Tippett was able to achieve Britten-like economy and intensity in his granitic and wrenching version of King Priam. This is an aria Achilles sings to his lover Patroclus for just two gently intertwining lines of tenor and guitar. We can’t wait to do this piece one day!”

“Skipping forward a generation, Maxwell-Davies’s The Lighthouse is simply a superb chamber opera for three singers and virtuoso instrumental ensemble in the extreme. The opening of this piece demonstrates all its virtues of immediacy, pungency and drama. SCO performed this in 2012 in an unforgettable production by Kip Williams.”

“An utterly different sound world now: Sciarrino’s hushed, skittering lines in Luci mie traditrici evoke the Renaissance world of Carlo Gesualdo seen through a new kind of Italian modernism. Unique in every respect, and high on the list for us to perform.”

“Kurtág is simply one of the world's great living artists. At 92, he’s still going strong and staging this profound Beckett song cycle in 2014 was a SCO highlight. The history of Western music is compressed into his tiny fragments of sound-memory.”

“Philip Glass is one of the most recognised and recognisable living composers. We staged his Kafka adaptation of In the Penal Colony in 2012 and it was a key early success for the company.”

“Romitelli’s wild and blistering An Index of Metals received its first staging with SCO in 2015, continuing the company’s long relationship with Jane Sheldon. This unclassifiable ‘opera’ is quite the ride.”

“Adès's scandalous and addictive early opera Powder Her Face is now international repertory. This is its most (in)famous aria.”

“Out of the gutter, Kancheli’s gravely beautiful song cycle Exil was SCO’s first collaboration with theatre maker Adena Jacobs in 2013, and this tragic setting of Paul Celan encapsulates his trademark darkness and luminosity.”

“George Benjamin’s Into the Little Hill is simply a modern masterpiece, which SCO performed in 2014. A retelling of the Pied Piper by post-dramatic iconoclast Martin Crimp, the two singers flicker between roles with tremendous virtuosity and the magical sound Benjamin conjures from 15 instruments has to be heard to be believed.”

“SCO performed Kaija Saariaho’s La Passion de Simone, an otherworldly meditation on Simone Weil, in 2019 and the spell this music casts is like no other. Every sung and played detail contributes to a sound that behaves almost like a living organism.”

“Dusapin is a leading living French composer who SCO featured in 2016 with two different stage works. O Mensch! for baritone and piano is, like the Janáček, a total distillation of song cycle and stage work and the perfect way to link back to the beginning of this Love List.”