English Touring Opera was one of the British companies that reacted most quickly to the constraints of performing during Covid, and to rethink its autumn plans accordingly. The replacement season it has devised, Lyric Solitude, is both practical and imaginative: three programmes of 20th-century pieces, each with a single singer and piano accompaniment. Strictly speaking, only two of the works included are operas – Poulenc’s La Voix Humaine, and Dominick Argento’s A Water Bird Talk – the rest are song cycles, by Britten, Tippett, Shostakovich and Poulenc, all of them staged, however minimally.
The season was unveiled as the latest weekend of music at Snape Maltings, and in the second of those programmes, which was divided into two hour-long sessions, dance, or at least movement, was the added theatrical ingredient. In Tippett’s Boyhood’s End, his cantata setting extracts from the naturalist WH Hudson’s memoir of growing up in Argentina, the dancer Paul Chantry traced abstract movements around tenor Thomas Elwin’s wonderfully lucid singing, while in the other work by Tippett, the song cycle The Heart’s Assurance, Bernadette Iglich provided the movement, unfurling a bedroll (or was it a shroud?) as Elwin delivered the settings of poems by Sidney Keyes and Alun Lewis.
Between the two there was Britten’s Holy Sonnets of John Donne, sung by Richard Dowling. Britten’s work also formed the centrepiece of the second session, where it was flanked by Shostakovich’s late Poems of Marina Tsvetaeva and more Britten, A Charm of Lullabies, both with the mezzo Katie Stevenson, as the touching soloist. There was more substance to the choreography here – Iglich again – while ETO’s artistic director James Conway was credited with the staging of A Charm of Lullabies, turning it into a monodrama, with Stevenson dressed as a schoolgirl in pinafore dress and ankle socks, sitting on a mound of flowers to deliver the final songs.
The common denominator in all of this was the pianist Ian Tindale, as secure and characterful in the baroque flourishes of Boyhood’s End’s piano writing as in the austere spareness of the Shostakovich cycle or Britten’s more obviously virtuosic accompaniments. I’m not sure the whole sequence adds up to more than the sum of its parts, but it is immaculately presented.
• At the Assembly Hall Theatre, Tunbridge Wells, 1 November. Then on tour until 12 December.
