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Turning the intimate space of the Croft Hall, Hungerford into a world of magic, The Music Troupe performs Edward Lambert's In Five Years’ Time, a rich feast of poetry, symbolism and mime, where Lamberts music adds and draws out something extra from Federico García Lorca’s words
If you were looking for interesting music theatre, would you look in Hungerford? Perhaps you should, because from time to time Edward Lambert turns up with his company The Music Troupe at the Croft Hall, and turns the intimate space into a world of magic. Never more so than on March 1st when they presented their latest production In Five years Time. It’s based on a surrealist play by Federico García Lorca, whose complex dream-scape, once believed unstageable, Lambert has made into a beautiful precis of moonlit characters who inhabit a past, present and future at any moment.
If you were looking for interesting music theatre, would you look in Hungerford? Perhaps you should, because from time to time Edward Lambert turns up with his company The Music Troupe at the Croft Hall, and turns the intimate space into a world of magic. Never more so than on March 1st when they presented their latest production In Five years Time. It’s based on a surrealist play by Federico García Lorca, whose complex dream-scape, once believed unstageable, Lambert has made into a beautiful precis of moonlit characters who inhabit a past, present and future at any moment.
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I came across advertisements for Ed and Norman’s “The Rapture” on Audition Oracle not long after the vain attempts of Royal Opera House leadership to take a Palestinian flag from dancer Danni Perry at the curtain call of Verdi’s Il Trovatore. Frustrated that dancers, singers and a composer widely renowned for intentionally politically charged works were being forcibly rendered “apolitical” by the leaders of our industry, I couldn’t have come across a more worthy story to be told from our perspective as Westerners in Britain — the empire that brokered Zionist colonisation of Palestine.
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An advert for my new opera The Rapture rejected by the Meta bots. "Bible and Bombs in Palestine - opera".
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Programme booklet of first performances:
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It seems to me, the year begins anew after the shortest day. However, with all the reflections on FB today, I’ll throw in my thoughts on a busy and peculiar year of musical composition. This time, 12 months ago, I was working on Swellfellow the Tyrant, an obscure political satire by Shelley which could hardly have turned out more topical and relevant in the light of the subsequent Tory machinations. Written for a local opera group which then failed to grasp the nettle, they thought it wasn’t popular enough to rustle up support. A foolish sentiment, in my opinion, as opera won’t thrive going forward unless the repertory is renewed with small-scale, entertaining but relatively economical works. An opportunity lost to work in the local community. And so, straight on to write The Burning Question for young Norman Welch which didn’t start off with the idea that the dead pope should be female, but that’s how it landed up. It went down pretty well at the Tete a Tete Opera Festival in the summer - lots of young people there - and, as I write, there are plans to revive it soon. Probably the best team effort I’ve enjoyed working on: it’s so satisfying (and flattering) to see a talented cast throw themselves into something you’ve written. Four months later, and another piece is finished: Masque of Vengeance, this time a Jacobean tragedy, a bloodbath in which most of the comparatively large cast are slaughtered by the end. I really must try and understand why, after Elizabeth’s death, this genre of revenge tragedy flourished. Wait! I meant Elizabeth I…! And in between we released the film of Last Party on Earth, which we shot live on a set and on location during lockdown. There aren’t many opera films other than relays of house performances, so thanks to Korina Kokali et al. for the inspiration. All things considered, some steps in the right direction this year: as one acorn said to another, we may be small but we’ll give it a go!
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A project in the autumn and winter lockdowns recently has been to finish another Lorca setting. My operatic version of Así que pasen cinco años I've called In Five Years' Time, which seems a more natural translation than 'When Five Years Have Passed'. Death is a theme of the play and very much in the headlines right now.
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Written before the pandemic outbreak, this could hardly have been more timely. A rhyming libretto by Leo Doulton at first had me stumped: how could such a doom-laden scenario be treated as a 'comedy of manners', as he put it?
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