If you like your opera to be dark, dramatic, tragic – and short – then the double bill of newly-created one-act mini operas, Life Stories, from Calderdale composer Tim Benjamin will certainly not disappoint.
Benjamin, who likens his musical style to that of 20th century Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich, has based his new works, Silent Jack and Rest in Peace, on short stories by Anton Checkhov and Anthony Peter. While each story is set three centuries apart they have common threads.
The first, Rest In Peace, is set in Moscow 2020 and reflects on the life of an old man who has become homeless. His story is told through questions and examinations of his past. Who is he? Why is he sleeping rough? And what will become of him?
Benjamin, a regular contributor to the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival and a past winner of the BBC Young Composer of the Year, says he was inspired by Chekhov’s short stories. “It is very Russian and quite bleak in a way, but a great little story - a satire on society as well,” he explained. “What I wanted to try and get across was for people to think ‘there is a homeless person, but they have a whole life that has brought them to this moment’.”
His second opera, Silent Jack, is set in 1720 and is loosely based on the story of 17th century Lady Katherine Ferrers, who, according to popular legend, was a female highwayman, robbing travellers at gunpoint and eventually dying from gunshot wounds. Katherine’s misdeeds became the 1945 film The Wicked Lady.
“Her story is told in flashbacks,” says Benjamin, who lives in Todmorden and settled in Yorkshire after studying at the Royal Northern College of Music. “She is a woman from a wealthy household who married very young to a dashing soldier. He runs off with another woman and she is left penniless and takes up highway robbery. We see her living in a cellar and dying of gunshot wounds. The last stagecoach that she has robbed was occupied by the man who had left her and it is unclear whether he has shot her or if she has also shot him. There’s a twist at the end.”
Both operas tackle the issue of how someone becomes homeless and ends up living in dire straits – and they do this in short acts lasting only 35 minutes. They are sung in English and feature single performers in each – mezzo-soprano Taylor Wilson in Silent Jack and bass James Fisher in Rest in Peace.
Life Stories is a contrast to the full length opera, Madame X, which premiered last summer and was Benjamin’s eighth major work.
Benjamin’s company Radius is producing the new operas, which will tour the North from the beginning of July and then move to the Tete a Tete Opera Festival in London at the end of the month. Life Stories can be seen at the Square Chapel Centre for the Arts in Halifax on Friday, July 3, at 7.30pm.
Ticket details from www.squarechapel.co.uk or 01422 349422.
