CONTEMPORARY ARTS
OPERA
Tippett and Hopkins MICHAEL Tom= has completed his opera, The Midsummer Marriage, but as yet there is no news of its being produced. (The same is true of Lennox Berkeley's Nelson, which won golden opinions at a run-through last year and has never been heard of again, at least by the public.) At the Royal Phil- harmonic Society's concert on November 18th, the Swiss conductor, Paul Sacher, included Ritual Dances from Tippett's opera in his programme. There arc four, corresponding to the four seasons and the four elements—complex and solidly con- structed pieces that invite a symphonic nomenclature expressly forbidden by the composer. This, he assures us, is narrative music for dancing. The ballet is still con- ventionally the lightest and least significant episode in any opera where it figures; and, unless Tippett has broken with this tradition, The Midsummer Marriage—which is des- cribed as a comedy—must make formidable demands on the orchestra. The dances are difficult music, with the ingenious rhythms often favoured by the composer and a wealth of figuration which is quite sufficient to engage the attention of an audience without the major visual distraction provided by a ballet. There is some effectively descriptive music in the winter dance The Otter Hunts the Fish, and a charming madri- galesque freshness in the spring dance The Hawk Hunts the Bird. Altogether the quality of this music pleads imperiously for an early performance of the whole opera, even if it is only a broadcast per- formance for a start.
The Intimate Opera Society, now under the musical directorship of Antony Hopkins, performed two of the new pieces in their repertory at the Guildhall School of Music on Saturday afternoon. Joseph Horovitz's The Dumb Wife is based on the old chestnut of the Man who had his wife cured of her dumbness, regretted it, and had himself made deaf as the only solution to his difficulty. The commonplace nature of the story left the audience in little doubt as to anything beyond the details of the dénoue- ment; but this drawback was small com- pared with the music's lack of any definite character. It was always fluent, sometimes apt; but ranged in style from Quitter to Vaughan Williams and off at a tangent to Britten—an odd, savourless kind of "basic English" for a composer born in Vienna to write.
Antony Hopkins's Three's Company, on the other hand, was most entertaining and far more individual. It is no invidious reflection to say that its manner has points of resemblance to that of Ibert's Angelique and Menotti's The Telephone (still Menotti 's best work from the musical point of view). Michael Flanders's skit on the emotional entanglements known to arise even in the best conducted offices is carried on with great verbal dexterity, which often recalls that of W. S. Gilbert. Hopkins's musical wit is of the same irreverent, pyrotechnical variety (an aria for typewriter and piano was conceived with unerring taste) and the whole work was presumably written for the three singers who performed it so excellently
—Stephen Manton, Eric Shilling and Eliza- beth Boyd. Mr. Hopkins explained that the piano accompaniment was no makeshift but an integral part of his conception, and under the composer's fingers it proved wholly adequate. The only serious fault in this otherwise delightful piece was its length. No joke should exhaust the reverberations set up in the audience by its first impact and Three's Company could be a masterpiece -of its kind if it were skilfully cut.
MARTIN COOPER
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