Cupboard Love
Music: Madeline Dring
Libretto: DF Aitken
Three Sisters Who Are Not Sisters
Music: Ned Rorem
Libretto: Gertrude Stein
Director: Jonny Danciger
As so often, the Grimeborn Opera Festival has shed light on some interesting but obscure corners of the operatic repertoire. This is a fun double bill that gives two largely unknown 20th-century pieces the best possible chance. Even if the case for them joining the standard repertoire is not entirely convincing, they are worth seeing and make for an enjoyable evening. Unusually, there are no subtitles, but (even more unusually) every word is audible.
Madeline Dring’s Cupboard Love is dramatically the more successful, well supported by D F Aitken’s witty libretto: an adulterous tryst is interrupted by the discovery of the husband’s corpse. Dring’s music, reminiscent of Poulenc, is spikily interesting but also lyrical: it’s the music of someone who sang her own compositions and has an innate sense of humour. Masimba Ushe has a sumptuous bass and natural comic timing as the doctor/lover, while Louisa Tee vamps to enjoyable effect, even if the Arcola’s acoustic makes her voice sound more characterful than sweet. They interact well with Ellie Westbrook’s corpse in Jonny Danciger’s atmospheric set, with its sinister bottles of perfume and medical equipment.
Ned Rorem’s Three Sisters Who Are Not Sisters is handicapped by Gertrude Stein’s libretto, which is as twee as the one she wrote for Virgil Thompson’s Four Saints in Three Acts. Chekhov, it ain’t. The music, whilst sometimes rather appealing, is on the bland side, with too many sustained high notes that seem to be designed to highlight flaws in the singers’ technique, although they respond well to the challenge. Rorem’s three non-sisters are outclassed musically by Wagner’s Rhinemaidens, Dvorak’s Water Nymphs, and Sullivan’s Three Little Maids from School.
The subject of children playing a game of murder is potentially icky or horrific, but, surprisingly for today’s disillusioned audience, composer and librettist sustain the mood of light humour to the end. Jonny Danciger’s inventive production hints at TV crime procedurals with parody macho cops and the corpses being outlined in chalk, but successfully keeps the darker stuff at bay. Ellie Westbrook, Kristina Ammattil, and Salome Sui blend well as the girls, whilst Eamon Walsh and Masimba Ushe (again) have a whale of a time as the boys/cops.
Musical Director Panaretos Kyriatzidis starts the proceedings on a suitably comic note, entering as a P.I. with an outsize magnifying glass in a deerstalker and dirty trenchcoat. He then sits at the piano to provide magnificent accompaniment, as well as interacting with the cast and providing musical direction for the unaccompanied passages. The Opera Makers are a talented, imaginative, and musically proficient company that knows how to give an audience a good time.
Runs until 1 August 2026
