Second Movement is a company intent on taking audiences into uncharted operatic territory.
Its latest show offers three one-acters, two receiving UK stage premieres. The singers are young, the tiny, wind-heavy orchestra has a vaudeville tang, and there is a pleasingly ramshackle air about proceedings, complete with hissing water pipes and protracted scene-changes.
This is the sort of semi-guerrilla ad-hocism that London opera needs. That things do not quite work out is not for want of commitment.
Offenbach's Two Blind Men is the kind of satirical squib, more spoken than sung, that mid-19th century Paris loved.
Oliver Mears's production updates it to contemporary London, where two rather posh vagrants find diamonds cached in a dead colleague's fundament, and dishonour among thieves wins the day. Short and sharp, the piece retains its bite.
Benjamin Fleischmann's Rothschild's Violin, about a Russian Jew struggling to get by as a coffin-maker, is darker.
Fleischmann died in the Leningrad siege, and his teacher Shostakovich completed the orchestration, here stripped-down but retaining its klezmerish melancholy. Yet the enforced economy of Mears's staging never becomes the virtue it could be.
Bohuslav Martin°u's The Knife's Tears works better. Written in Paris in 1928, it mixes cabaret, jazz and grand guignol.
A girl and her overbearing mother come across a hanged man. The daughter falls in love while the mother is bedded by Satan.
As the daughter, Yvette Bonner has a guileless sexuality, while Hannah Pedley makes the mother both harridan and harlot.
Jonathan Brown's Satan is more avuncular than devilish, but, like everyone else, gets the words across. Here, despite the subdued production, Second Movement is clearly on the right track.
Until Friday (020 7795 0556).
Second Movement: Spring Season Triple Bill
Covent Garden Film Studios
Mercer Street, WC2H 9QR
