Julia Portela Piñón’s Concepción was smoky and intense, with a vivid physicality and powerful sense of pent-up energies (her frustration with Gonzalve’s artistic rather than amorous priorities was especially funny) – her voice had great sparkle and flourish in the more virtuosic sequences. Fussy Torquemada was sung with nerdy flair by Samuel Kibble. Barlow’s direction captured many of the slapstick beats, though one gets the sense both this and Schicchi could’ve done with a few more performances to really let these young singing actors relax into the blocking and improvise a little around it. In the end she chooses the delivery guy – rugged, handsome, and “he doesn’t talk crap”.Ī strong cast helped realize Barlow’s dreamlike vision. She finds satisfaction neither in the poet Gonzalve (whose longing for poetic posterity rob from him the physical pleasures of the present), nor in the buffoonish banker Don Iñigo Gomez, whose loquacious self-aggrandizement is rendered with plummy indulgence from bass Michael Ronan. That Ravel’s opera was born in the period that saw Bergson philosophize about the nature of duration and Einstein theorize relativity is surely no coincidence.Ĭoncepción, sung by the impatiently frisky Julia Portela Piñón, has to run her love affairs like clockwork, in a stolen hour whilst Torquemada is out winding the municipal timepieces. Music has the capacity to stretch out a moment, to evoke infinity, or to make hours pass in what feels like minutes. Musical time makes an especially piquant contrast to the regulated clock time of work. The piece opens with a smart coup de théâtre on this theme: the curtain rises to a slew of metronomes, ticking away, and winding down (an allusion, surely, to György Ligeti‘s “Poème Symphonique” for 100 metronomes). Concepción is corseted by a pair of string instrument F-holes (a naughty joke, perhaps). Tempo markings adorn the set – Ramiro’s stopped clock – a violin – is marked ‘Sans mouvt.’ it is restored by Torquemada to ‘A tempo’ by the end. “L’heure Espagnole” takes place not in a clockmaker’s but a music shop, timepieces replaced by double bass cases, hefted to the bedroom and back by Ramiro, the buff, guileless delivery guy. Ravel’s Workīarlow’s production of both pieces puts a musical conceit at their centers – apt for a conservatory performance, with lots of scope for musical in-jokes that suited this audience down to the ground. As he notes in the program, what connects both pieces is that time is running out for the parties concerned: Concepción struggles to find a moment for an assignation Buoso’s grasping family want to change his will before his fortune is given to a Friary. This autumn they offered – across two casts – a double bill of Maurice Ravel’s mischievous farce “L’heure Espagnole” and Giacomo Puccini’s story of probate chicanery “Gianni Schicchi,” both directed by Stephen Barlow. The Royal Academy of Music is one of Europe’s leading conservatoires, with a renowned opera program for young singers whose stars are in the ascendant.
When it comes to sex and death, timing is everything.
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