Music
The Coffee Opera, CCA, Glasgow
Keith Bruce
three stars
Introduced to us as "a cheap little piece of entertainment" the radical intervention into the CCA's Cafe Saramago is certainly not that, even if none of the participants is likely to be getting wealthy through it. Just look at the quality of the band, directed by award-winning Bach scholar John Butt and including a chap from the RSNO on bass and Scotland best baroque cellist.
Nor was this Music of the Spheres production anything less than rich in ambition. Its middle Act is a staging of Bach's secular Coffee Cantata (BWV 211), a wry look at the new fashion for coffee drinking in the composer's day, with a libretto by his regular collaborator Christian Friedrich Henrici (a.k.a "Picander") and the nearest Bach ever came to writing an opera. On either side composer James Oldham and librettist Michael Wood have added their own context to the dialogue between Schlendrian (baritone Sam Carl)and his caffeine-addicted daughter (here called Lizzie and sung by Nora Holden). Kenneth Reid, like them also a student at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, is Bach's narrator and our barista host in a tale that skips cheerfully between the 1730s and the quest for a perfect coffee in our own age (Saramago has its own bespoke blend on offer).
Oldham's music is great fun, playfully acknowledging the debt minimalists like Glass owe to the baroque, before pulling the rug away with a verboten glissando, and Wood's libretto has much fun at the expensive of laptop surfers who can make a mug last all day. The whole piece, however, might benefit from judicious editing and a little sharper focus to achieve full effect. You'll still get a kick out of it though.
Repeated next Tuesday, April 28, and at Scottish Storytelling Centre, Edinburgh, the previous evening, Monday April 27.
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