This year, Tête à Tête’s summer festival of new opera is reduced to a handful of events. But one of the things it has put its name to turned out not to be opera or music theatre by any sensible definition at all – the world premiere of 2045: The Year Man Becomes Immortal?, by the composer and self-styled “electro-acoustic polymath” Toni Castells.
Why the company should have been taken in by such a hapless project is baffling. It could charitably be described as a song cycle, but really 2045 is a lame sequence of easy-listening ditties with ineffably awful texts, given a veneer of continuity and electro-acoustic polish with the use of backing tracks and cliched sampling.
The idea that prompted Castells’ piece is undeniably worth exploring – the prediction by computer engineer and futurologist Ray Kurzweil that the year 2045 will see the start of a new era in which human and artificial intelligence will merge, man will cease to age and so acquire the potential to live indefinitely. Castells explores the profound implications of all this by mixing soundbites of speech – including from Kurzweil himself; a woman describing a near-death experience, and a medium at a seance – with his own parlous music and interludes with wordless sopranos (think the opening credits of The X-Files), crashing waves and twittering birds.
It’s a mixture of pretentiousness and boggling naivety. All the performers involved, including soprano Meeta Raval, countertenor Oliver Gerrish, the Aquinas Piano trio and Helios Voices, deserved far, far better.
