Street Scene

Getting ready to go into rehearsals for Kurt Weill's epic Street Scene next week, at the Royal Welsh College. We have a week exploring text and character, and we're also kicking off work on the speaking voice and accents.

Our design is pretty much finished ready for the model box showing on Monday. We hope to capture something of the central tension in the piece; the battle between dreams and savage reality.

It feels remarkably timely to be doing this opera now - a piece exploring the American Dream - at the end of the high soaring rhetoric of the Obama presidency and the brutal reductiveness of Trump.

It reminds me a little of Britten's Paul Bunyan - two composers away from home, overwhelmed by new musical influences and sharing a fascination of the promise and potential darkness of the Dream.

More on this as we continue on our journey...