No one could accuse the Suffolk-based Opera East of a lack of ambition. Last year the company staged Britten's The Rape of Lucretia, and in 2005 plans to celebrate the centenary of Michael Tippett's birth with a production of his fourth opera The Ice Break. Its current double bill, Gustav Holst's The Wandering Scholar paired with Lennox Berkeley's The Dinner Engagement, is also likely to give many opera twitchers new works for their life lists.
Rarity value, though, is virtually all these pieces have going for them. Holst's one-acter, first performed just a few months before his death in 1934, at least has the virtue of brevity, getting through the vaguely risqué and quite inconsequential story of the randy farmer's wife, the lubricious priest and the starving itinerant scholar in barely half an hour. The score is spare (Opera East perform the chamber-orchestra reduction Britten made in 1951), and almost aphoristically terse, with just occasional excursions into folksy banter which sound very odd when the setting is very obviously French. But the libretto by Clifford Bax is contrived in relentlessly rhyming couplets, and runs out of steam very rapidly.
Still, The Wandering Scholar seems a masterpiece alongside Berkeley's snobbish, class-ridden piece of nothing, which sets a libretto by Paul Dehn which is so absurdly over-written that vast tracts of it have to be delivered parlando. It was first performed in 1954, and the story - gentry who have fallen on hard times and attempt to marry off their daughter to a rich foreigner - has dated badly, and so has Berkeley's score, which flirts with a number of mid-20th-century idioms - Britten, Poulenc, Stravinsky - without ever finding a voice of its own.
Alistair Boag's productions do what they can with such inert material, while Oliver Gooch injects as much energy into the scores as they can take, and they get a good response from the orchestra and the singers, among whom the soprano Lorina Gore, the wife in the Holst and daughter in the Berkeley, is the most striking.
· At Burnham Thorpe Church, Norfolk (01728 602216), on August 7.
