Opera Scotland

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Music

Gareth Williams

Text

Margaret McCartney

 

Premières

First Performance: Glasgow (Òran Mór), 20 February 2009.

Scottish Opera première: As above.

 

Background

This was the third piece to be performed of the group that made up the second batch of Five:15 mini-operas. A hospital ward may not be the most obvious location for an operatic subject, though it should be an obvious milieu in which to create sympathetic characters. The quartet of hospital staffers was perhaps too reminiscent of the family left at home in Weill's Seven Deadly Sins.

 

Characters

Patient (soprano)

Mother (mezzo-soprano)

Cleaner (contralto)

Hospital staff (counter-tenor, tenor, baritone, bass)

 

Programme Note

An outsider is thrown into a foreign and uncompromising environment which triggers memories of the past. The piece explores methods of communication and expressions of feeling, finding parallels between the mundane and extreme, when faced with making sense of the grief that a mother feels after losing a child.