The sound of the station piano drifts down the St Pancras International concourse, past the shops selling last-minute gifts before the Eurostar check-in. Nothing unusual there – but get closer and other sounds emerge: a clarinet, soprano and tenor, telling a post-pandemic story about reconnecting with the small pleasures of commuting. This was It’s the Little Things by the composer Rose Hall and librettist Katie Colombus, one of seven micro-operas written by all-female teams for the Royal Opera House, popping up around the station to mark International Women’s Day. Each had a bare handful of players and singers conducted by Yshani Perinpanayagam or Ellie Slorach and directed by Diane Page.
The idea for the project – titled Lost and Found – had come from the Belgian chamber ensemble Casco Phil, who staged something similar last year in Antwerp and Brussels, and who provided the instrumentalists here. The pieces, though, were all new, themed to the venue and intended to draw in passing, unsuspecting audiences – which to some extent they did, although by definition people at a station rarely have time to stop and listen for long. That’s unless they are pathologically early like the anxious main character in The Hardest Journey, a miniature by composer Anna Braithwaite and librettist Kerry Priest in which with some deftly witty writing the voices of Siri, the station tannoy and a hungry child, plus some body percussion train noise effects, are provided by three male singers.
Couple dynamics were treated in comic style in Mini-Break by Victoria Bernath and Teresa Howard or as a breakup in The Parting Place by Sarah Lianne Lewis and Sophia Chapadjiev. With each piece lasting only a few minutes, and with the performance spaces spread out around the station, works were performed two or three times in a row. Hearing things again immediately, often interpreted by different singers, made for some of the most satisfying listening. I Just Wanna Be (in Center Parcs), by Joanna Taylor and Kerry Priest, really needed two listens, once to enjoy the pointed complaining of the female character, against itchy percussion and violin backing, and once to listen to the drawn-out dreamings of her mismatched tenor partner.
The same was true of Detritus, a sombre duet for bass and violin with music by Laura Reid and words by Oge Nwosu, a monologue on belonging delivered by a migrant station cleaner and apparently inspired by St Anthony of Padua – not that you needed to know that to be moved by it. Blaise Malaba was incisive, directly addressing members of the audience; Jamie Woollard was more reticent. Each interpretation made an impact.
All 10 singers – all part of the ROH’s Jette Parker Young Artists Programme – impressed, and several stood out, including Malaba for magnetic presence, Siân Dicker for her knack for comedy, and April Koyejo-Audiger for a gloriously full-bodied soprano that it would be good to hear in a big role soon.
