Hey look, ANOTHER goldang set of opera shorts! It never ends! Well, these are all by Irish composers, so that's different. I guess. Covering all twenty in one go might make for a slightly unwieldy entry, so I'll break it in two. The second half coming tomorrow, probably.
01. Gerald Berry, "Mrs. Streicher"
Okay, this is pretty amusing: it features Beethoven, sitting at a table and singing (actual factual) letters to his landlady complaining about poor laundry service, uncooperative servants, and so on. It's done in a very stylized way, where he frequently pauses in the middle of a sentence or word until the next line. The only musical accompaniment is a dude occasionally tootling a note or two on a tuba. This actually isn't my first encounter with Berry: I saw his Importance of Being Ernest when it was on Operavision, and then never wrote about it (hey, it happens). But it was likewise zanily entertaining, and the style here feels extremely similar. You can associate the subject matter with lockdown stir-craziness, or not. I'm not forcing you one way or the other.
02. Éna Brennan, "Rupture"
Here we have a close-up of a woman's face, and she's singing and trying to be positive about her situation and her future, only then her negative side starts coming out (her face blurs and doubles), and starts singing negative stuff. Not bad, although I have to say, she kind of has the glassy-eyed look of a cult member, and I really, really hope that's the way she's made up and not how she actually looks, because if if is it's just me being a jerk. Looking at her website, I think it's that she's always wearing really distracting contact lenses, but I could be wrong. Either way, not a bad piece.
03. Irene Buckley, "Ghost Apples"
A ghost apple--if I understand the explanation aright--is an apple that grows just as winter is settling in, and then gets encased in ice such that the actual apple rots away leaving an empty apple shape. I'd never heard of these, but they're a real thing. Neat. Here, they're a metaphor for environmental degradation and loss. The action takes place in a lab with a scientist ruminating about all this stuff, and the Pacific Garbage Patch (and she has a highly visible Macbook--is this opera branded?). I thought this was all right, but I definitely get too depressed thinking about these things to do it for long, and that extends to this piece.
04. Linda Buckley, "Glaoch"
Here's a piece about...videochatting and disconnection under COVID. Nooooo! You thought we'd get through this without another of these? You FOOL! You foolish fool! Well, even if I'm not impressed by the subject matter, this does actually have pretty good ghostly music which carries the day, and--as you might've guessed from that title--it's sung in Irish, which adds a bit of novelty to the proceedings.
05. Robert Coleman, "The Colour Green"
So there's this Irish writer, Mark Boyle, who lives without technology, and this is about him and also he wrote the libretto. The visuals are all in the form of mildly-animated paintings, which I liked a lot, but that's about all I liked here. There are recordings of Boyle talking--repeated a number of times--and some really annoying singing about his sleep patterns and things. Erg. I don't know what to say. There's certainly something appealing about this lifestyle, but regardless, boo to this one. If you don't think a five-minute piece can feel excessively long, I would recommend you check this one out.
06. David Coonan, "verballing"
I think a policewoman is being instructed on how to question people. There is lots of text on the screen, but she only says "yeah," "no," and "[wordless moaning]," over some screechy violins. This is all animated, in a style that's so perversely ugly that I feel like it has to be intentional. But either way, I did not care for this even a tiny bit. Two clunkers in a row? Let's try to do a little better next time, yeah? Okay.
07. Alex Dowling, "Her Name"
A boy lives at a boarding school, and recounts his situation in a slightly abstruse way. His mother has died, is the long and short of it. I liked this. The boy soprano, Seán Hayden, acquits himself very well. It made me think about my own mother and start feeling a little Verklempt. I may not have much to say about it, but it's a poignant piece.
08. Peter Fahey, "Through and Through"
This uses traditional folk music: it starts with what seems to be some sort of mutated version of the last part of "The Outlandish Knight," the weird part where she bribes her parrot to not give away that she's been out (though in a different context). Then, it switches into "Henry Lee," which probably most of us know from the Nick Cave version. Well, the woman's not really singing, in any operatic sense, and the minimalistic backing squawking is what it is. I like the kind of Child Ballad stuff this is riffing on, so I sort of liked this, but it's really not that memorable as its own thing.
09. Michael Gallen, "At a Loss"
A woman sings about--apparently--her mother's imminent death (from COVID?), and thinks about energy in general. And stuff. One does sort of get numb to this sort of effort at profundity, but it's actually okay. The visuals are good: she seems to be in a hotel room or something, and behind her we see stars, and there are flickery lights, and it's admittedly kind of eerie. Whevz. I've seen worse.
10. Andrew Hamilton, "erth upon erth"
"A response to a terrifying walk through a Covid Hot Zone," the Operavision description says, and I will have to take their word for it. This is largely close-ups of a frightened woman's face, acompanied by something that is apparently a Medieval poem, but again, I must take their word for it. It doesn't really say much of anything. Especially since this is the last entry in the first part, I'm sorry to say it, but I basically hated this. Really irritating nothing.
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