Brawn triumphs over poetry or social status in Maurice Ravel’s L’heure espagnole, in which three lovers court the sexy wife of a clockmaker while he is out each week winding up the town clocks. She opts for a muleteer, short on conversation but big on muscle, who only drops by to get his watch mended. In farcical misadventure, her other two admirers hide inside clocks.
This delicious comedy, with a score as rhapsodic – harp glissandi at every opportunity – as it is meticulous in its horological tickings and whirrings, formed the second half of a triple bill, directed by Ella Marchment and staged by the Royal College of Music opera studio at its home base, the Britten theatre. A well-drilled orchestra, conducted by RCM director of opera, Michael Rosewell, gave deft and idiomatic performances of the Ravel, along with two song cycles, Benjamin Britten’s Les Illuminations and Kurt Weill’s Chansons des Quais: widely contrasting works, each to a French text and each with a powerful female protagonist.
