Tête à Tête Opera Festival, Riverside Studios, review

All over Britain, people are dreaming the opera dream – and that doesn’t just mean they’d love to see La Bohème at Covent Garden, it also means that they long to make their own contributions to the art form as well.

This is where two modest summer institutions have enormous value: both Grimeborn at the Arcola in Hackney and Tête à Tête’s festival at the Riverside Studios in Hammersmith provide a nurturing environment in which small groups and individuals can play out their ideas in provisional or workshop form before friendly audiences who are invited to provide feedback.

Budgets for these operatic laboratories are minuscule, but the atmosphere is rich in constructive critical encouragement. As yet, no masterpieces have emerged from the Petri dish, but one day who knows?

Tasting my way through Tête à Tête’s opening programme, I saw three short pieces, all of which had merit. Gala is Ergo Phizmiz’s portrait of Salvador Dali’s harpie of a wife. In old age in the late 1970s, she became a rampant cougar, infatuated with the twentysomething Jeff Fenholt, at that point playing Jesus Christ Superstar on Broadway (later he joined Black Sabbath).

The progress of their squalid little affair makes for an entertaining and colourful scena, musically illustrated by Phizmiz’s wittily sampled montage, woven out of flecks of familiar tunes. Unfortunately too few words were audible in awkward vocal writing, and the half-hearted use of marionettes seemed pointless.

The first act of La Belle de la Bête is a wistful, gentle affair, unfolding Clarke Melville’s tale of the blossoming love of a Barbadian canecutter and an English aristocrat -– set not in the era of slavery, as one might expect, but in 1962. Peter M Wyer’s score weaves reggae and spirituals into a pleasant musical texture, but it was unclear to me where it was all leading, either musically or dramatically: the overall effect was too somnolent.

Soon, with music by Tom Smail and text by Alba Arikha, is set in a carriage on a stalled Eurostar train. Tempers rise with the temperature, stories are told, a man drops dead and the ghosts of Modigliani and Chopin are evoked.

Smail’s music is meticulously crafted and it’s refreshingly easy to hear the words. The problem, again, was one of sluggish pace and vocal lines lacking emotional import and melodic shape.

Until Aug 18. Tickets: 020 8237 1111; tete-a-tete-org.uk