INO’s Twenty Shots of Opera review – a much-needed dose of Covid innovation
Bang on St. Patrick’s Day, Irish National Opera (INO) has launched its Covid project, Twenty Shots of Opera. That’s about the same quantity of AstraZeneca vaccine Angela Merkel has so far managed to inject into the arms of the German population.
Shots has been rushed from the backstage labs of INO in Dublin to a European audience courtesy of Nurse Eurovision Opera, jabbed into ears and eyeballs via a laptop encounter, no appointment needed, and in record time. Grab yours here until 13th September while free shots last. After that, you have to go private.
The project made 2020 a year to remember, for positive reasons. Conceived, composed, rehearsed, recorded, filmed and edited in just six months by 160 opera professionals from all corners of the artform, these 20 short operas showcase the breadth and depth of Irish operatic talent. Some of the vignettes on offer may be outlandish, obscure or downright weird, but none are dull. These are artists flexing their muscles, showcasing the depth of native talent on the Irish music scene.
There has been widespread concern about potential side effects. Concentrated, intense and not to everybody’s taste – like shots of espresso with no comforting frothy bits – these 20 shorts mount attacks on the nervous system. Critics say conventional opera productions are less risky. Side effects from Shots on the status quo are as yet unquantified. Grant cancelling to boring people may be one.
Composers who spend years in grant-swaddled isolation, grinding out occasional works will condemn INO’s rush to the public stage. Their plodding output is at risk if young talent is allowed to bring untested productions front stage, sidestepping well established taste regulators.
Shots releases Covid repression, addressing a huge range of topics; “Finding human connection, dealing with rejection, grief, illness and death, coping with psychological challenges, protecting the environment, living off-grid, pandemic dating, wetsuits, latex gloves, super-spreaders, Beethoven’s laundry, microbiology and doughnuts.”
Hang on a minute! Beethoven’s laundry? What’s that about? Who cares about laundry, even if it is Beethoven’s? This must be scraping the bottom of the basket. Surely that one failed the basic sanity test and should be withdrawn? I didn’t hear Meghan and Harry talking to Oprah about laundry. They never got beyond frocks, bedspreads and two weddings. Can’t be relevant.
Oh, yes, it is – in a wildly anarchic way. The first of the Shots, Mrs Streicher, is a setting of letters Beethoven wrote to Nannette Streicher about struggles with his laundry, servants and mental state. He whips himself into a frenzy of paranoia and compares his maid’s laziness with Christ’s suffering on Golgotha. Well, we always knew he thought highly of himself.
Nanette Streicher was a remarkable woman. Born Nanette Stein, she took over her father’s piano making business when he died, making the start up a huge success, her son finally selling it off in a private equity buyout deal to Stingl, pianoforte brand influencers, in 1896.
What she thought about Beethoven’s urgent need to emote about his dirty laundry in correspondence is, sadly, not recorded. Initially, I thought director Gerald Barry had gone nuts. Here was a white-shirted, grey coiffed stern tenor, Gavin Ring, sitting at a desk, staring out intently, barking disjointed syllables which swooped up and down octaves. I thought I’d tuned in to Sir Keir Starmer at PMQ’s on a bad day by mistake.
But not even the socially distanced House of Commons boasts a background Tuba player, looming in the gloom, burping occasional rasps to emphasise the significance of a missing sock. What was the point of this dissonant diatribe? Well, everyone know Beethoven was deaf, but I was not aware how deeply his well-documented frustration had burrowed into the mundane acts of everyday life. A story worth telling. Poor Beethoven.
Listen again to the clashing start of the final movement of the Seventh Symphony and suddenly missing socks, badly ironed pantaloons and mangled neckbands are flying everywhere. Barry’s thesis is that the profound depths Beethoven plumbs, especially in his late works like the quartets, have their origin in a deeply disturbed psyche, beyond what is acknowledged.
Rupture, which follows, is more introspective: “Sometimes we are our own worst enemy… We fall victim to a conscience poisoned by society’s repressing landscape. A rupture occurs within ourselves – the timeless fight between good and evil.”
Jo Mangan’s offering is about a split personality, Woman, sung by Rachel Good and Conscience, by Sarah Richmond. Music and text are from Éna Brennan. Now, the filmic nature of the INO project is exploited, Woman’s head morphing occasionally into two, making a duet of the conflicting emotions. To say we’ve all felt like that sometime is not to dismiss the work as trivial. Rather, makes the point that it is high time we noticed this is the way our minds work. The piece is beautifully crafted.
And beautiful craft is what this project is all about. Sussing that audiences are ready for something new, INO has “carpe’d the diem” to bring filmography to opera as an integral part of the performance, not just a means of delivering it to the viewer.
That is now commonplace. Over 30 years New York’s Met has pioneered the broadcasting of opera, gradually introducing sharper camera angles, graduating to mobile cameras on wires and dollies. Onscreen viewers have been brought even closer to the action than live audiences in the auditorium; and given a different, privileged viewpoint. INO builds on the trend and takes it to a higher level.
Here is a selection from the rest of the lengthy running order, with occasional commentary, to give a sense of the range of works on offer:
Ghost Apples:
“Alone in her lab, a scientist studying the 1.26 million square kilometre mass of floating plastic known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch looks for patterns, and some kind of meaning. By looking at the phenomena of ghost apples, and seabird corpses loaded with plastics, she starts to uncover the disastrous and indelible imprint humankind is making on our planet.”
Glaoch:
“When conversations occur through screens, our eyes can’t meet. Our connection falters, then breaks. In these times of rift and rupture, who haunts the glitch?”
We’ve all zoomed to this spot during Covid. In a year or so when we wonder what all the fuss was about this work will be an important curio, reminding how quickly our lives all changed and could change again.
verballing:
“A Garda is coached on how to answer awkward questions. It’s awkward. Awkward question for you: what’s the difference between answering truthfully and telling the truth? Another one: what’s the difference between self-defence and pre-emptive offence? Last one, promise: do you trust Gardaí always know the difference?”
This should be compulsory viewing for Cressida Dick and her increasingly dysfunctional Metropolitan Police force. The tortured cartoon Garda figure eventually buckles under the pressure of having to toe the party line.
erth upon erth:
“A response to a terrifying walk through a Covid Hot Zone in a Birmingham hospital in April as seen through the lens of a Medieval English poem.”
A true shocker. A glimpse into the realities of the hospital world we clap cheerily on our doorsteps but can never truly understand. No holds barred, body bags, mortuaries, the slow slipping from intensive care to death. A potent reminder that bland statistics should not blur the harrowing human experience our healthcare workers undergo on our behalf.
Dichotomies of Lockdown:
“In seven sad, funny, and absurd vignettes, two people navigate the changes within their world and within themselves in a time of pandemic. As they jump from one situation to another, we see how they adapt to new rituals and new vocabulary.”
A lighter side at last! Phew! Jenn Kirkby’s lampoon of all of us coming to terms with alien technology, hilariously depicted by Aebh Kelly (mezzo-soprano) and Andrew Gavin (tenor), is a must-watch, wham-bang-delivered reminder that we may think we are newly minted Covid techno stars, but more likely self-delusional idiots. Hilarious.
Touch:
“A solitary man and woman become increasingly aware that their separate worlds consist of uniquely enclosed environments. Are they listening to their surroundings? Can they survive without listening? They discover that the sounds of five words are their only means of communication and perhaps their only means of escape.”
This is my favourite. Simply because the performances of Naomi Louisa O’Connell (mezzo-soprano) and Gyula Nagy (baritone) are outstanding. Ms. O’Connell has that mezzo magic that breathes character. They sing with and against each other in a kaleidoscope of hallucinatory backgrounds. What is composer Karen Power’s self-awareness wake-up call all about? Franky, I haven’t a clue. By now didn’t really matter. I was overwhelmed by the visuals and the singing.
Libris Solar:
“And then the bliss came, as though in being suspended in this cosmic movement and losing the motility that comes from taking a stand and taking hold, I had found what I went down in the sea to find.” (Alphonso Lingis – The Rapture of the Deep).
A marine biologist meditates on the enigmatic figure of Libris Solar, an alchemical blend of human, non-human and neoprene”.
No, I don’t really get it either. Total pretentious guff really. Bladerunner 1949 meets Inception. Enigmatic? Understatement. Incomprehensible. Too bad the last of the Shots was a bummer. Every opera has a duff aria.
Taken in the round this is a ground-breaking project from INO at a moment when the easy option was to recycle “same old” in a different format. I think Twenty Shots of Opera will be viewed with envy by peers who lacked the boldness to use a lack of audience to redefine what opera can offer as a total experience.
INO has decided to play risky Elon Musk against the Met’s loveable, reliable, NASA-tried-and-tested In Concert series. Shots is crazy and amazing in its daring. We gasp as each of the performances reaches for the sky, goggle as some return safely to the launchpad and don’t give a dam if others explode spontaneously after landing. This is a riveting two and a quarter hour glimpse into the future of opera. Never mind the potential side effects. Savour it.