Did somebody say "opera"? When you're talking about music to people who are absolutely at ease with the idea that a "band" can be two guys playing eight CD players and who don't turn a hair at the notion of a hand-held fan as an "instrument", you begin dimly to realise that when they say "opera", they're not thinking of La Boheme. Yet there's something undeniably bohemian about four young people sitting in an upstairs cafe in Dublin's Temple Bar, exchanging ideas about the nature of music and theatre at the beginning of the 21st century.
The four in question are members of The Whispering Gallery, a music collective which was set up in the summer of 1999 to promote performances of experimental and improvised music in Ireland - to help fill the gap between the halls of academe and the real musical world, as they put it. Between them, they have produced a pair of short operas which will be performed in Player's Theatre, TCD on alternative nights; the hour-long Obegon, with music by Simon O'Connor and libretto by Simon Doyle, and the 45-minute Neshika, with music by Jurgen Simpson and libretto by Clare McCumhnaill. Both pieces, say their creators, represent deliberate attempts "to think beyond the narrow structures of either musical or theatrical performance" towards "a digitally enabled hybrid". Which, frankly, sounds so terrifying that it's a relief to hear the creative teams launch into confident accounts of what the operas are "about".
Neshika, says Clare McCumhnaill, "is the Hebrew word for `kiss' and the piece is based around the betrayal of Christ by Judas Iscariot. The kiss is a kind of vortex of the emotions which precede and follow it - the realisation of betrayal, but also the realisation that Judas was the enabler of redemption."
"We were looking for a scene which would allow us to create an opera with a religious foundation," adds Jurgen Simpson. "Not that we're trying to convey a religious message, but it seemed a good platform to work from. I was also interested in creating a piece of music which would distort time."
Obegon, meanwhile, was inspired by that most operatic of texts, a short story by E.T.A. Hoffman. "I was a bit fed up with these existentialist types who decide to stay at home and pit themselves against the world," says Simon Doyle, "so I decided to take it to the extreme with Obegon. He rejects his loved ones in act one and his mentor in act two: in act three, having achieved existential freedom, he goes to the pub." "Where," adds Simon O'Connell, "he has an existential crisis." Despite all the crises the score of Obegon, says O'Connell, is very accessible. "It's not Bing! Drrrrrrrrr . . . dah-dah-dah, dah-dah-dah, Bing!" he adds, helpfully. "A lot of it is very quiet and slow - and the vocal writing is completely tonal. That's mostly to do with singers. They're good at singing tonal music and not good at singing atonal music."
A crucial point, this: you can do away with such outdated notions as plots, tunes and even - thanks to the wonders of electronic instrumentation - orchestras. But if you're going to write anything remotely resembling opera, you're still going to need someone to sing it. Which doesn't mean, needless to say, that they'll be singing anything remotely resembling a tune. The very mention of the word "tune", indeed, provokes an outbreak of genuine hilarity among both composers and librettists. "Well, in the 19th century," says Jurgen Simpson, "the aria was, like, your single, which came out - and then people could buy the sheet music and perform their own renditions of it. But really, since the operas of Berg, that whole aria approach is gone." The role of Judas in Neshika will be sung by Andrew Redmond, who will also feature in Obegon. "We got his name and went to see him singing Lieder at the Goethe Institute," says Simon O'Connell. "And there was this one Schumann song where he was so distraught, he was like this" - he twists his face into an expression of agony - "and he kept his face like that even when the vocal part was finished and the piano went on for maybe 30, 40 seconds. That was how we knew he was our man."
Soprano Belinda Quirk, says Simon Doyle, was recruited from a recording. "I heard her sing this way-out, crazy part and I called her up and it transpired that her voice had changed; six months previously, she had gained an extra octave at the bottom of her range. Which makes her a tenor as well . . . " That's opera for you, folks.
Neshika runs at Player's TCD on October 9th, October 11th and October 13th.
Obegon runs on October 10th, October 12th and 14th. All performances at 10 p.m.
