In memory of Kate Waring, a short review of her chamber opera Porcelain and Pink
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17 September
Posted in memory of composer Kate Waring, this is a short-form review of her setting of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s sketch / play Porcelain and Pink as a one-act chamber opera
Just as Cole Porter does (in Kiss Me, Kate, say), carefully using the device of the curtain-raiser to introduce us beforehand to (or remind us of) the themes of songs that follow in each half, so this Kate, Kate Waring, deliberately sets the musical scene with her overture to Porcelain and Pink, as well as giving us the scope of what is to follow :
In Kate Waring's @PinkNPorcelain, clarinet, cello and piano set out, in an overture, the thematic mood / material for the later three voices
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) February 28, 2015Cellist Jon Fistein, clarinettist Sarah Bowden, and pianist Alex Reid are the same instrumental forces as a year ago, when they gave us Kate’s companion-piece, Are Women People ?. Together, they herald, and then accompany, returning vocalists Hazel Neighbour (soprano) and Jessica Lawrence-Hares (mezzo-soprano), with the only change from before being that James Proctor (bass-baritone) replaces having a role for a tenor.
As we already know, the timbre of the two female voices is nicely complementary, and we find the same to be true of those of Hazel and James (the latter is familiar, at and after his time at Clare, for skill in the art of the blended voice). And, as the overture hints at (even if the framing is, of course, essentially comic), there are a few darker strands : lyre-like, the strings of the piano are directly swept three times, maybe four, as if as a portent. Yet the manner of doing so in no way invokes John Cage’s work, but the approach of Orpheus – perhaps playing a song about eternal nature and destiny, because of, and through the operation of, The Fates ? Thus the repeated gesture can be heard as embodying the primaeval tensions that are casually evoked by Fitzgerald’s text : the ancient impulses to be naked, to sing, to dance !
Whereas, putting bathing in its historical context, the early twentieth century had safely established it, at least for public consumption (and whatever the truth behind the glitz of Gatsby’s functions, or that of The Diamond as Big as The Ritz), as a private, sacred, even penitential time, or practice – not, on any account, to be seen as a pursuit, pastime or pleasure (or not, at any rate, to be seen in that way by the masses ?)…
A state of moralistic affairs that may not seem not so distant from when Thoreau, living in – and off – Emerson’s woodland near Concord, gave an account of his way of life in Walden ? (Even if Hawthorne, as we would expect and even require of him, can be found playing some deliciously ironic chords, in The Blithedale Romance, about his own experience of that period…)
At root, though, Fitzgerald also wants us to show a young woman who is making, and then wholly enjoying, the chance to flirt quite inappropriately, play a part, and, needless to say, tease us, too, with her bath-time antics : Kate Waring clearly relishes what can be found in these scenes to ground a libretto, and so, having revisited them (as she did the perhaps overlooked writings of Alice Duer Miller, with Are Women People ?), bringing them to the musical stage.
From what might otherwise have seemed an inconsequential work by Fitzgerald (even though it did cause him notoriety), she has made a finer piece and brought out both its comic and deeper potential through her setting and her care.
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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
