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Benedict Mason ChaplinOperas Easy Street Della Jones This evening with London Sinfonietta and distinguished singers was a near-miss, and raises yet again the vexed issue of words and music. The programme notes, and Misha Donat's article in The Guardian, leave no doubt that the complex text (in several languages and doggerel) is important for Mason (the libretto was posted in full around the walls of the QEH foyer, and they can be accessed - for a week - on the London Sinfonietta website). But the words were almost totally inaudible, except for a few moments when the dense orchestral mayhem abated briefly. Della Jones and Omar Ebrahim seemed to be amplified to little effect; it was no better when I changed my seat to the fifth row from the front, close to them.So, leaving that aside, what to say? It was refreshing to have an approach quite different from the usual Carl Davis scores with full symphony orchestra, and Mason is right to question received assumptions about music for silent films. The publicity material said it would invent its own brand of humour "playing with the relationship between stage and silver screen". (Another recent take on the early film revolution was Shooting Shakespeare, which had live actors actually moving through the screen, treating the bizarre vogue for Shakespearean actors to mime to camera; the results available on DVD). Mason's is a multi-layered approach, and in the swirling music one caught several allusions to familiar music, and doubtless missed many others. It was an invigorating experience but palled as the evening wore on; three Chaplin shorts treated in this way were no more rewarding than the two before the interval. But the fault seemed to lie mainly with the controllers of Sound Intermedia at their console; indeed audibility was just a little better for the last film. As with so many operas, even those in English, one needs (and should have had) surtitles; we are now so accustomed to splitting and dividing attention between different sources that these would not have been distracting. So what is now needed is a DVD of Benedict Mason's ChaplinOperas with the usual subtitles. It could be a hit!
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