Miss Fortune, two words, is the title of Judith Weir’s fourth full-length opera, or, in the German-surtitled version in which it was premiered at last year’s Bregenz Festival, Achterbahn. That word means “rollercoaster”, and it is the precipitous ups and downs of fate that are the theme of this sharply colourful adaptation of a Sicilian folk tale (words by Weir herself), unveiled with the same cast, conductor, director and dazzling sets at the Royal Opera House, the work’s co-commissioner.
The titular name immediately points to the kind of piece it is — a comic allegory, though with a distinctively Weir-ish wryness. The young woman, Tina, leaves her rich Fortune family when their finances crash, resolved to make her uncosseted way in the world. She becomes a machinist, then a laundry girl, and keeps hoping things will improve, but Fate, personified and supplied with henchmen (in the form of breakdancers), keeps mucking things up. At the last, though — and by moving the clock back, no less —Fate secures for her a huge win on the lottery, which she promptly hands to the needy, preferring love — a sudden romance with a laundromat customer — to money.
There’s a sense of the picaresque, and Tina’s journey through the world involves plenty of satire (not least of the credit crunch and bankers), though it is a fast journey (seven scenes, 90 minutes), and arguably something is sacrificed to concision. Tina herself, perhaps. Though dominant — and beautifully sung by Emma Bell, in tight red dress, with bright red hair — she also seems a touch nebulous, as though more of a concept or agency than a person. Admittedly, allegory permits such a thinness, but that doesn’t prevent, for example, Kurt Weill’s Anna, in The Seven Deadly Sins, from coming over as all too human in her comparable progress through modernity. Yet Weir’s laundry-owning Donna — who finds a world of metaphysical speculation in the turns of a washing machine — has, in this vivid assumption by Anne-Marie Owens, an instant solidity and appeal. And if the Fate figure (the pervasive countertenor Andrew Watts) is irredeemably contrived, the kebab-seller Hassan (the tenor Noah Stewart), whose van is exploded by Fate’s gang, is made real through sheer lyricism. Tina’s admirer, Simon (Jacques Imbrailo), has an ardent vocal presence, too.
But the realisation of Tina seems ever about to be. When she gets to the point of actively confronting Fate, the interval abruptly arrives; and, though she makes that invocation eloquently in the next scene, with its strangely atmospheric opening music, one suspects her fate may be in the nature of a fatal briskness of operatic treatment. Likewise, the concluding lottery win and jaunty departure into a happy-ever-after are a bit sudden. Weir is a splendidly economical composer, but telescoping and the lightest of touches are not everything. She draws close in this work to the later, foreshortened operas of Tippett (his New Year also features breakdancing), but she does not finally have the truly bonkers wackiness that allows him to drive the absurd and zany into the authentically visionary.
Not that her score lacks power: it unfolds with mastery and many a glint of unusual colour, felicitous twists of harmony, half-allusions (now to Bartok, now to Vaughan Williams, now to..?) that she calmly makes her own. It was sympathetically conducted by Paul Daniel. The director is Chen Shi-Zheng. But it may be that Tom Pye’s set, with its vast, mysterious broken plane wing, suffused by Leigh Sachwitz’s ravishing complexity of video design, is the true emotional centre.
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Another new opera on the misfortunes (putting it euphemistically here) of a female protagonist — Adam Gorb’s Anya17, given by Ensemble 10/10 under Clark Rundell in Liverpool and at the Royal Northern College of Music, in Manchester, where I caught it — is at an aesthetic remove from Weir’s. This hour-long, densely packed single act is conscientiously issue-driven, the harrowing subject being the sex trafficking that goes on in the European Union before our very eyes. A “$32 billion industry”, we were informed, “second only in size to the drugs trade”, and frequently murderous.
Ben Kaye’s libretto is the outcome of gruelling research. The titular character is “an ingenue and child of uncaring parents” lured from an unspecified eastern European country with hopes, soon shattered, of a better future. The “17” may be her age, but is certainly her number on a list of buyable girls. The other three girls in the cast of seven include Mila (Joanne Holten), killed by the overseer, Viktor; Elena, who has been blinded by a beating and her baby son disposed of; and Natalia (Lucy Baines), a kind of brothel madam. She doubles as Carole, the counsellor who comes to Anya’s rescue, seen with her at the beginning and near the end, framing the action with slender hope; but the actual end is a terrible shriek by Anya and her disconnected words of pure pain.
Anya17, then, could hardly be bleaker, and the libretto has an earnestness chilling in itself, yet Gorb’s score is a marvel of boisterous inventiveness, albeit with a savage snap. The opening bars are like cracks of a whip, but the diversity of Gorb’s inspiration is quickly evident. Basically tonal, and with an eye for clever pastiche, it plausibly links (as he suggests) the spikiness of eastern European idioms with the sly smoothness of jazz; annexing the West End musical for Natalia’s gaudy numbers, but approaching the intensity of Berg in the remarkable interlude for unison instruments that marks Anya’s lowest point.
The vocal writing is skilful enough to let unsurtitled words emerge clearly a respectable number of times, and ambitious enough to extend to ensembles, with a concerted (sextet) finale that is as traditional to the genre as the theme, here drastically foregrounded, of female abuse. Andrea Tweedale, as Anya, gave a bold, accomplished performance. Amy Webber well projected Elena’s bitter pathos and Thomas Hopkinson managed the difficult task of being unpleasant before an enthusiastic audience in a small hall. The work did not seem to lose much by a bare concert staging — the director was Caroline Clegg — but did not need to be preceded by a first half of three modern pieces. The event was, admittedly, part of a festival of work by northwest composers, but the opera deserved, like Miss Fortune, to stand alone.