FULL SOON (Tom Smail) London 2013 Jane Howells, Kate Symonds-Joy, Matt Long, George Humphreys

Information on the Performance

• Work Title: Soon   
• Composer: Smail Tom   
• Libretto: Alba Arikha    Libretto Text, Libretto Index
• Venue & Opera Company: London, UK  
• Recorded: August 1 & 2, 2013
• Type: Staged Opera Live
• Singers: Jane Howells, Kate Symonds-Joy, Matt Long, George Humphreys
• Conductor: Carlos de Cueto  
• Orchestra:
• Stage Director: Rosalind Parker  
• Stage Designer: Tarka Kings  
• Costume Designer: Morgan Veazy  

Information about the Recording

• Published by: tete a tete  
• Date Published: 2014  
• Format: Streaming
• Quality Video: 4 Audio:4
• Subtitles: nosubs  

• ADDITIONAL INFORMATION ON THIS PERFORMANCE

  Genesis

  SOON started out as a narrative poem about a voyage. Writer Alba Arikha was stranded on the Eurostar, between London and Paris. It sparked her imagination, and her writing. When her husband – composer Tom Smail – read it, he said that he could hear the music in the words. The opera SOON was born. It is their first collaboration – the story of a journey through time, place and memory.

  Synopsis

  An hour outside Paris, a train comes to an unscheduled stop. As the other passengers bicker, become restless, confide, flirt, argue and dream, the narrator remembers: lovers, childhood, marriage, divorce, hardship, and death. As she reminisces, her mind wanders. She is twenty years old, on a street in Paris. Frédéric Chopin interrupts her thoughts. He isn’t well; neither is the painter Modigliani, who asks the narrator to sit for him, one day in 1917. A child begins to shout. The heat on the train becomes oppressive. Darkness looms. Threatens. Retreats. It is a sea of flowing, swelling harmonious sounds and whispering echoes. The boundaries of self are dissolved by imagination and memory, until the journey resumes and a life suddenly ends.

  Tom Smail has set words to music many times. In his most recent work, a setting of Samuel Beckett’s last poem, ‘What is the word’, he created a powerful dialogue between words and music.

  Under the baton of rising star Carlos de Cueto, and with a first rate cast of performers, SOON is an equally unforgettable voyage, which begins “an hour outside of Paris/pale yellow flatlands/and raindrops falling/tentatively on the window/facing a forgotten road”.

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