A student-run opera society at @UofGlasgow. Our aim is to make opera accessible for students both to perform and to experience as an audience.
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ALT Melania - Artistic Director Professing one's love for coffee could be considered most fittingly performed in a space devoted to the beverage. Just as the cantata had been supposedly acted out in Zimmerman's coffee house at some point during the 18th century, this interpretation of its aria situates it in a contemporary café; a public space that is merged with the private when representing it upon a stage that is set up within a personal room. It allows for several manners of enjoying coffee to be portrayed through a single gesture. Those that love drinking it may know how its joys can be found in the simplest of days as much as during the most eventful. This is a celebration of such joys.
ALT Robin - Musical Director The same sound-world of J.S. Bach, more often associated with something like the crucifixion of Jesus in the Passion, but applied to the profane rather than to the sacred. This is also known colloquially as the flute aria, and indeed much of the interest comes more from where the singer responds to the flute, and where the flute suddenly subordinates to the singer. At first, the singer plays on ideas introduced by the flute, the flute moves the piece from F# minor to C# minor - but then the voice comes back in, and on a dime the flute reverts to D major. The singer’s love for coffee is sufficient to exert control over the composition. A musical joke.
ALT Melania - Artistic Director What better way to capture the feeling of being unable to fall asleep than through embodying the personification of sleep itself being interrupted from his slumber. The interruption is none other than the result of the unavoidable cycle of day and night: pure unobstructed light. Any attempts to veil this pestering presence fail as one's desires are all too easily subdued. The sole cause of this conflict is the incongruence of one's desires with nature's unrelenting course.
ALT Robin - Musical Director Handel does everything in his musical powers to avoid it sounding as if Somnus is enjoying himself, in the end landing somewhere between wrought and annoyed. The dance rhythm underlying is in three but is too slow to be sprightly rather than tantalising. Handel sets up a recurring phrase length, but then pushes through it to stop it being enjoyable any more. Somnus doesn’t even get a properly resolved cadence. All in all, it’s rather a sad piece.
ALT Melania - Artistic Director The entire aria assumes an underlying tone of sadness when ‘the woman’ (Cio-Cio-san in the original) is seen as accepting her fate instead of merely possessing defiant, eager hopefulness. This means that, rather than painting a picture of what she hopes to happen, she is singing about what should have happened, already seeing herself in a future where it does not. As if already knowing that he will not return to her, she is indulging in the thought of her greatest desire being accomplished, hanging onto the still-present possibility that he shall return before it steadily wanes as days go by.
ALT Melania - Artistic Director The presence of Eurydice follows Orpheus in the form of the absence of light obscured by one’s own living figure. Much like the prisoners of Plato’s Cave, Orpheus is willingly ensnared by the idea that the two-dimensional plane contains a realm within which what is yearned for resides, whose gateway, if locked, is at least palpable. Although a mere manifestation of Orpheus’ own thoughts and desires, it is a source of hope to soothe one’s grief.
ALT Robin - Musical Director The idea of descent into the underworld predates even the Greek and Roman Orpheus poems by several thousand years (in the Sumerian 'Inanna's descent', she orders before she goes that those on earth 'Lacerate your ears for me, in public. In private, lacerate your buttocks for me.') Gluck’s innovation is to set Orpheus’ story in a rather baffling sound world, where the C major arpeggios with which the singer begins lamenting Eurydice’s loss seems to belie the received wisdom that ‘major equals happy’. Gluck uses the conventions of structure to explore the stages of grief - Orpheus asks no-one in particular where Eurydice is; then, Orpheus does exactly the same thing again, not accepting yet that the answer might be, ‘dead’. Rilke's sonnets to Orpheus: 'Oh Orpheus sings!....And all grew hushed. But in that very silence a new beginning'.
ALT Melania - Artistic Director The expression of what would otherwise be an unseen inner turmoil can be considered the essence of this piece. The ubiquitous nature of such an emotion often causes this piece to be found in even the most ordinary of places. A stage is superimposed upon a private space when the intention to perform an expected role is met with an overwhelming emotion set in direct opposition. The intended performance fails, revealing the cathartic performance of a self-deprecating soliloquy instead. Our view as an audience shifts from observing his introspective musings to assuming the perspective of the absent audience to whom he should have been performing. The dual presence of both scenes within our main point of view lets us witness a battle endured alone where he, as a source of comfort to others, remains devoid of it in the moment when the desire to please is surpassed by the intensity of despair.
ALT Robin - Musical Director Leoncavallo’s aria is popular but understandably so - it fits a lot of emotional heft into something immaculately structured, but crucially brief. The anguish comes through in the angular opening phrases, and indeed a general sense throughout that the character is uneasy about sticking in one key. The singer swells from the bottom to the top of the vocal range, but doesn’t stay there - until the final phrases, at which point almost as quickly it finishes. It is difficult to try to bring any kind of musical reinterpretation to something which already has so much power.