Elegy

at the BT until Saturday 26th February 2000

From this Tuesday until Saturday 26th, the Burton Taylor Theatre is showing a new Music-Theatre piece by the young Oxford-based composer Nick Hughes.

Elegy is a group piece performed here by clarinet, double bass, piano and two soprano voices, one of which also takes the acting role. The piece takes what is good in modern operatic style and combines it with narrative monologue to produce a result which is seldom encountered, Music-Theatre remaining a relatively unexplored genre perhaps partly because of its straddling of the boundary between stage and concert-hall. Works within it have often taken the form of scaled-down opera, but in this case the instrumentalists are not divided from the other performers by being assigned to the pit or hidden elsewhere offstage: they are an integral part of what is visible. Conventional boundaries are thus broken down: the music itself becomes a performer in, rather than just a backdrop to, the dramatic performance.

Elegy is a strikingly moving work, its text deftly interweaving Shakespearian imagery with an unpretentious spoken-English style which is poetic in the simplicity and directness with which it addresses the issue of loss. Unlike some other modern musical works there is no sense here that the cerebral is dominating the emotional, even given the fact that the main current running through the piece is the importance of the role of memory in our retaining our sense of connection to deceased loved ones. The music forms an audible map of the emotions and thought-processes which the acting character has moved through in coming to terms with the death of her father, a journey marked by turbulent anger at memory's obverse face - cruel unreliability - and culminating in resolve in the face of this. The intimate environment of the B.T. will be most appropriate to the highly personal nature of this beautiful piece, which will leave a lasting impression on an audience - as it should upon the Music-Theatre genre.

Louise Durban