No one could doubt the good intentions of the Genesis Opera Project, launched by the Genesis Foundation two years ago. The idea is to encourage young composers to write operas and then to provide the wherewithal to get the best of those new pieces on stage. The initial results of the scheme, three works commissioned after a prolonged process of selection and workshops, are staged this month. The first of them is Sirus on Earth, by the Montreal-born composer Paul Frehner with a libretto by Angela Murphy.
It is not an auspicious start. The members of the selection panel who thought that Sirius on Earth had the makings of a viable stage-work really need to go away and lie down in a darkened room.
The kindest way to describe the plot would be as a futuristic farce. Sirius is a city in the not too distant future ruled by a despotic mayor who controls his populace with a drug, Amberosia, which makes them entirely satisfied with their lot. The audience could have done with a shot or two to get them through this tediously overlong, laboriously comic evening, in which bad French accents and nudge-nudge jokes about coming in 10 minutes are the standard currency. Some people in the audience laughed uproariously, but unfortunately they gave themselves away by their Almeida sweatshirts; the rest of us without such (literally) vested interests sat in numbed disbelief at the awfulness of it all.
Frehner's score, valiantly conducted by James Holmes, has a John Zorn-like hyperactivity. The word setting is either hysterically incomprehensible or reduced to vaguely inflected declamation and plain speech when the words have to come across. None of it adds anything dramatically to what is dead in the water from the start. The production, by Jean Frédéric Messier, is a combination of Whitehall farce and village-hall panto, and what excellent singers of the calibre of Jeremy Huw Williams, as the S&M loving mayor, or Joanna Burton, as his dominatrix mistress, have done to end up in a show like this is hard to imagine.
· Further performances at the Almeida, London N1 (020-7288 4999), then at Snape Maltings Concert Hall, Snape (01728 687110), on August 1.
