Sound bites

Tête à Tête: The Opera Festival
Hammersmith Studios

It’s 11 years since I first went to a Tête à Tête evening, then at the Battersea Arts Centre, a most agreeable location, but not used by Tête à Tête since 2004, I think. Nowadays there is a whole festival each year in August, the operatic low season, planned by the founder and artistic director, Bill Bankes-Jones, whose enthusiasm knows no bounds. Sometimes I wonder if it might not be a good thing if it knew at least one or two. The first, and excellent idea he had was to encourage young composers with an interest in writing opera to write a short one, say 20 minutes long, with a pithy text. If you think of the sprawling and shapeless first attempts of many operatic composers, it seems a great shame that they didn’t have a Bankes-Jones to encourage them to keep it short.