Four play

Going to the Riverside Studios in Hammersmith for the annual season of Tête à Tête is a chancy affair, though one can be sure of a very high standard of performance, both vocally and instrumentally. It helps, of course, that none of the studios is large, so the singers can produce their voices at conversational level, though many of them choose not to. As always, there is a big range of operas to choose from, so the choice of the pair I shall be discussing was based on no principle other than that the subject of one of them intrigued me, and while I was about it I saw another. In fact, I saw two more, but they were very brief, about ten minutes each, and performed in the Riverside Studios foyer, as a warm-up for the audience. I found them both inscrutable, though they seemed to give pleasure to people who were quicker on the uptake than I am.