Reviews of Love and Loss – haunting, tragic and beautiful in a Royal Opera triple bill | Opera

Tales of Love and Loss: this title made a trio of English-language actors from the Royal Opera’s Jette Parker Artists sound like something very serious. In fact, it made us laugh.

Of course, after the first job the mind could slow down. Elizabeth Maconchy’s 1961 two-hander The Departure, it was last held in 2007it begins with a woman watching a funeral from her bedroom window; when her husband comes home she realizes that it is her death that is mourning her, and she is there to say goodbye. Directed by Talia Stern, in 1960 produced by Ana Inés Jabares-Pita, it played with melodrama, especially in the flashbacks where he remembers the fatal car crash, and the ending, with the sound of a child crying, felt mawkish. However, Maconchy’s music, clear but expansive in a way that made it sound like an orchestra larger than Britten’s 14-year-old Sinfonia, drew the attention of mezzo-soprano Ellen Pearson and baritone Sam Hird.

Charlotte BrayMaking Preparations, which began at the 2012 Tête-à-Tête Opera festival and set the famous libretto by Kate Kennedy, also has a woman as a ghost, but here it is funny: she is the author of a letter to persuade a rich, boring, soon to be with her husband. Something appears, and we find ourselves about to cheer her on in her destruction through the box of her evening dresses. Bray’s lean, direct character, led by Peggy Wu, tells the story vividly, not in the climactic scenes where her husband Hewson reads the letter and Margery’s voice looks in and out. Hird and Hannah Edmunds captured the sad atmosphere perfectly.

The winners came last. Elena Langer‘s Four Sisters, also from 2012 but presented here in a new upstairs orchestral version, opens with a morning scene in a smart 1980s house: in the background, a coffin and a portrait of a radiant parent; On the designer sofas in front, his three famous daughters, passed out in different ways, waking up when the maid poured Veuve Cliquot from their sleeping fingers. The plot, cleverly delivered in John Lloyd Davies’s tweezer-sharp libretto, hinges on the reading of his will and the presence of a fourth daughter – the revelation of whose identity is not very convincing because we see it running on the horizon from the beginning. Langer’s music is simple, alternating between the styles of the sisters’ mini-arias sharing their dreams of wealth, and the actors – Pearson, Jingwen Cai and Madeline Robinson as the sisters, Hird as Noo Yoik’s lawyer and Edmunds as the black horse Maid – had a ball with them.