This year’s fall opera offering from the Glenn Gould School is a double bill; Barber’s A Hand of Bridge and Bernstein’s Trouble in Tahiti. Both of these were written in the 1950s and satirise bourgeois marriage of the time. Opera goers are absolutely used to seeing the marriage customs of, say, the 1850s or 1790s sent up in opera but some how the 1950s seem weirdly exotic. Director Mario Pacheco seems to have thought so too and sets both works in Dr. Pritchett’s Clinic for Matrimonial Memory Erasure. So the quartet in the Barber are nurses in scrubs; three of whom also form the trio for the Bernstein where Dinah and Sam are played as patients. It actually works pretty well.
Unruly Sun is a song cycle in 19 parts with music by Matthew Ricketts (left) and words by Mark Campbell (below). It’s inspired by Derek Jarman’s Modern Nature and was performed last night in Mazzoleni Hall by tenor Karim Sulayman accompanied by piano and string quintet. I was much more affected by this piece than I expected to be. The text covers a lot of ground; Jarman’s cottage at Dungeness with it’s bleak shingle beach and nuclear power station, AIDS and the loss of friends, a bad porn movie and, of course, Jarman’s garden (which also of course inspired 
