Almeida Opera launched its 2002 season with the London premiere of Gerald Barry's The Triumph of Beauty and Deceit. But its first brand-new offering was the Opera Group's production of Edward Rushton's one-act opera, The Young Man with the Carnation, based upon a short story by Isak Dinesen (aka Karen Blixen).
Rushton is a composer with a real gift for writing theatrical music. He is currently working in Switzerland as a répétiteur and accompanist, and has already acquired a real sense of how to communicate vivid, memorable musical images. His instrumental writing has a real zip and imagination. But he is not yet so accomplished at communicating an operatic plot to an audience, or at least at calculating what listeners can absorb comfortably at a single performance.
Tom Smith's libretto pares down Dinesen's story to the point of incomprehensibility. The nocturnal adventures of the young writer Charlie Despard, who is in despair over a creative block, are portrayed in a series of surreal scenes - an encounter in a hotel room with a woman he believes to be his sleeping wife; the arrival of a man carrying a carnation; a sailor who saves him from suicide and regales him in a bar with a mysterious story; a chaste encounter with a prostitute; and finally the appearance of God. Each brings him to an epiphany and reveals the way in which his life can go forward. But an awful lot is packed into a 45-minute score, and anyone going to see the show would be well advised to read the original story before they tackle the opera.
The vocal writing tends to be functional declamation that rarely takes flight. Around it, Rushden invents some remarkable sounds, using just single wind, strings and percussion. The scene in the bar, as Charlie and his new friends launch into a ribald sea shanty and draw the members of the ensemble into their singing, is witty, and the way in which motifs are picked up from the vocal lines and instrumentally transformed binds the whole thing together. All this is not enough, though, to sustain interest in characters who are incompletely presented; we cannot care about Charlie's existential angst because we do not understand it fully.
The production, by John Fulljames, is economical and direct and the performances - Peter van Hulle as Charlie, Emma Selway as his wife and the prostitute, Andrew Slater as the sailor and God - are thoroughly competent. But ultimately there is more bafflement than reward.
· At the Buxton Festival, July 10 and 19. Box office: 0845 127 2190.
