Come Closer is a new opera with music by Ryan Trew and text by Rachel Krehm.  It’s scheduled to premiere at Factory Theatre on June 13th but last Wednesday in the RBA we got a preview of some extracts.  Come Closer deals with Rachel Krehm’s relationship with her younger sister Elizabeth who died in 2012.  It started out as a song cycle setting seven of Elizabeth’s poems and now has narrative added to create a stage work.  Yesterday we heard four extracts with Rachel playing herself and Jacqueline Woodley (who I hadn’t seen for far too long) as Elizabeth.  Accompaniment was piano trio with Evan Mitchell conducting.

It’s a very personal work of course, dealing with the relationship between two sisters, and that has risks but what we heard avoided being over sentimental and did a good job of setting the poems; which are impressive for work written by someone so young, in some kind of context.  I want to see the whole thing before saying much more.

The music works well with the text.  The piano, often playing repeated arpeggios in a kind of modern minimalism (I almost want to call this “post minimalism”) provides something akin to a ground bass for the violin and cello.  The emotional range is more obvious in the strings; ranging from a kind of ethereal beauty through something much darker to loud and angry.  It’s pretty accomplished and played extremely well by Trevor Chartrand (piano), Allene Chomyn (violin) and Rebecca Morton (cello).

There was enough on show to suggest there is a work of some substance here.  It’s musically interesting in a distinctly modern but approachable way and the sensitive subject matter is handled in a way that is performable and watchable.  And, bonus, tickets for Come Closer are 25% off until the end of the month.

Photo credit: Dan Truong