Bernstein - Trouble in Tahiti & Poulenc - La voix humaine (Buxton, 2025)

Trouble in Tahiti - Leonard Bernstein
La voix humaine - Francis Poulenc

Buxton Festival Opera, 2025

Iwan Davies, Daisy Evans, Charles Rice, Hanna Hipp, Chloé Hare-Jones, Harun Tekin, Ross Cumming, Allison Cook

Buxton Opera House, 23rd July 2025

There have been double bills of short operas at the Buxton Festival in the past that have adventurously even managed to connect two different works that appear to have very little in common. I reviewed The Maiden in the Tower & Kashchei the Immortal by Sibelius and Rimsky-Korsakov in 2012 and La Princesse Jaune and La Colombe by Saint-Saëns and Gounod in 2013, but I don't think there has been one since then. This double bill for the 2025 Buxton International Festival is a hard sell however; two works with a very bleak outlook on relationships which, for all their differences, are actually complementary on some level. It still takes a little creativity to link Bernstein's Trouble in Tahiti with Poulenc's La voix humaine, but in the Buxton tradition Daisy Evans managed to do that quite successfully, even if that meant doubling up the misery.

As bleak as the outlook is in each of these works individually, their strength is that they are very good at what they do. What they do is present a miniature opera with a concentrated intensity that suits material that would probably be less effective (and unendurable) if they were drawn out any longer. Their very concision make them special, allowing a singular mood to be explored, offering a rare intensity that would feel out of place in a longer work (although Ambroise Thomas has a go at rivalling such emotions with his long soliloquies and a mad scene that lasted a whole Act in Hamlet at the Buxton Festival on the previous evening). Whether the two works gain or not from being connected - or whether they even should be brought together - is debatable, but as far as the Buxton production went it did intensify the works without overburdening their inherent simplicity.

Trouble in Tahiti is a challenge in itself, almost setting itself up to be deeply unlikeable in a way that is hard to define. Bernstein's treads a tricky line between parody and satire, between seducing the audience with catchy show tunes that celebrate the ideal of the typical suburban American married couple (of the 1950s) by setting it to sunny music, with a cheesy chorus, radio jingles and musical numbers while at the same time throwing in some dissonance that hints that there is a dark and corrupting side to the American dream that lies beneath the surface. The libretto throws out some cliched lines, undoubtedly sold by idealistic musicals like the film 'Trouble in Tahiti' that Dinah goes to see, but yet they also reveal truths about the circumstances of a married couple at a standstill in their relationship and about to grow more distant.

There is a lot to 'unpack' in the contrasts of the sunny music and the reality of the disintegration of a relationship, so what you probably don't need in a production of Trouble in Tahiti is anything that just makes it even more 'troubling'. Or maybe you do, because while the opera hints at Sam being a bit on the fresh side with his secretary - something he doesn't even consider as cheating, but just a part of conforming to the natural law of being a man - Daisy Evans' production went further to show evidence of Sam's philandering. She does this quite cleverly (and maliciously) by tying Bernstein's work into Poulenc's La voix humaine.

The presence of Allison Cook behind a lace curtain in a warmly lit room off to one side of stage was an early clue to what was to come in the second part of the double bill, the little box room practically an ideal of a typical set for Poulenc's La voix humaine, a room designed to feel perfectly claustrophobic for a woman waiting on a phone call from her lover, feeling trapped and caged with no way out of her predicament. What you might not have expected however was Sam to wander into the room while he is supposed to be out at the gym and start undressing the lady in the room. It's there that Sam goes to deliver his master of the universe soliloquy, boasting of his masculine superiority, winning another kind of 'trophy'. Is the lady of La voix humaine his secretary, Mrs Brown? She's going to be let down by the time we get to the second part of the double bill. Things really aren't going to get any more cheerful.

"That was the most depressing opera I've ever seen", a lady exclaimed at the interval in the bar of the upper circle at the Buxton Opera House. "Wait until you see the next one", I warned. I didn't of course spoil it for the lady by telling her that La voix humaine is about a woman unravelling at the breakup of a relationship who attempts - and maybe even succeeds - in committing suicide while on the phone to her ex-lover. Perhaps I should have said something, as I'm sure she went home traumatised after Allison Cook's performance as the lady left hanging on the telephone.

That indeed is the unfortunate premise and fate of the lady of Poulenc's (what is usually a) monodrama. The perspective of the double bill production changes accordingly however, the little box room off to the side of Trouble in Tahiti opening up to show a woman spilling sleeping tablets over the dresser and floor as she tries to reconnect a faulty telephone connection so that she can pour her heart out to a man who traditionally we don't actually see on the stage. It's usually the case that no other figures are seen and no other voices heard - or needed in this intense piece - but here the phone is picked up in the home of Sam and Dinah.

Given this insight into the other side of the phone line serves to take in the wider context of what we are witnessing. We see Sam making silent gestures, trying to be placatory and being somewhat insensitive to what he probably sees as emotional blackmail, while it's clear that it really amounts to a call for help to simply hear a sympathetic human voice. That isn't found either when Dinah, tired of these mysterious calls to her husband, picks up the phone and is devastated by what she hears. Not for the woman's sake, of course, but for her own marriage and for which she will probably forgive her husband in the end.

La voix humaine doesn't need this. It's debatable whether it helps in any way to visualise the person on the other end of the line, and take such a determined stand on what their nature might be. We already get hints of that from the one-sided conversation, so it doesn't need to be spelled out. There is something to be said for just letting us see the woman, 'Elle', and Allison Cook did not need any additional props or bodies (the chorus from Tahiti also make mournful appearances) to get across the state of mind of her character. But the touches and the connections were subtle and unobtrusive, and it seemed that rather than opening up the claustrophobic drama, it may indeed have made it feel even more traumatic.

There was perhaps a greater challenge for Iwan Davies and the Buxton Festival Orchestra to marry together the two completely different styles of music for the two short operas, but they presented both superbly. As with the outstanding Hamlet the previous evening, the key to really making all these pieces work is in the singing. Perhaps even more so here since there is a lot of intense solo singing, although Hamlet had that too. Charles Rice as Sam and Hanna Hipp as Dinah were both tremendous, engaging you in their own personal worlds and making you feel the depth of their troubles in their clashes. Allison Cook, much like her Gertrude the previous night, also had a rather extended physical meltdown in this production of La voix humaine as 'Elle', and carried you along, all too emotionally involved in the torment she was going through. 

Whoever was responsible for pairing these two operas together - I imagine it was the Festival Opera director Adrian Kelly - really challenged the audience and put you through the wringer. You weren't going to see many smiling faces when you left the opera house, but it would be hard not to be impressed with the unique qualities of these works, the performances and the creative artistry in making two short operas that never sound all that appealing in synopsis come fully alive and show deep insights into their human characters.

External links: Buxton International Festival

Bernstein - Trouble in Tahiti (Leeds, 2017)

Leonard Bernstein - Trouble in Tahiti

Opera North, Leeds - 2017

Tobias Ringborg, Matthew Eberhardt, Quirijn de Lang, Wallis Giunta, Fflur Wyn, Joseph Shovelton, Nicolas Butterfield, Charlie Southby

OperaVision - August 2018

The Americans are coming, we've been told. While Europe has tended to go in one direction as far as 20th century contemporary music goes, breaking away from conventional diatonic scale, America has largely worked within the more familiar tonal hierarchies, telling us that traditional classical music is not dead yet. There have been a few tentative attempts to bring Europe back into the fold so to speak or at least recognise that there are still areas to explore and rediscover. Barber's Vanessa at this year's Glyndebourne, Jake Heggie's Dead Man Walking at the Barbican and Kevin Puts' Silent Night at Wexford and forthcoming at Opera North, have all made minor inroads but few have been as successful as Philip Glass or, in the music theatre world (where I think most edge closer towards), Stephen Sondheim.

Where Leonard Bernstein fits into the landscape of modern American music and opera is rather more complicated and varied, scoring Hollywood and Broadway musicals, a conductor, writer who composed in a number of styles, working in popular song, jazz and classical idioms. I'm not familiar with his opera work at all - it's taken until his centenary this year for any real opportunity to experience any productions this side of the Atlantic - but they keep telling us that the Americans are coming, so the opportunity to see Bernstein's first short opera Trouble in Tahiti is one that perhaps shouldn't be missed.

Whether Trouble in Tahiti is typical of Bernstein I couldn't say, but it certainly conforms to my impression of lying closer to the Broadway musical composer than opera. On the other hand, there's clearly a certain amount of knowingness and satire in the short opera's all-American subject and treatment and certainly a more complex side to the music behind its breezy swinging jazz-influenced score and melodic song arrangements. The problem with satirising American domestic life and attitudes however is that it ends up portraying banality and there's a danger that the music could also be equally banal.

Opera North's heightened all-American production however ensures that the audience is in awe of the superficial attraction while being aware of the observation and commentary on the attitudes promoted by consumerist society that lie beneath it, forcing distinctions between winners and losers, between male and female roles. The opera opens with an all-American couple sitting at the dining table over breakfast. Involved in a petty argument over going to see Junior in a school play, it's obvious that after ten years of marriage the spark has gone from Sam and Dinah's relationship and it might not be so easy to rekindle.

Neither seem particularly interested in making the effort and, to be honest, the consumerist lifestyle and social model doesn't encourage any deeper engagement with each other. Sam sees himself as a little god in the office, making deals and being praised for his sporting prowess, while a three-piece close harmony radio-jazz chorus pay glowing tribute to his own sense of greatness. Dinah meanwhile goes to see a 'South Pacific' style musical called 'Trouble in Tahiti', "a terrible, awful movie" but despite herself, she enjoys the escapism of its songs that take her out of herself for a while, until she has to go back and make Sam's dinner for him coming home.

It's no Von Heute auf Morgen (although it could certainly form a contrasting view of domestic life if the two short works are ever paired), but the swinging, upbeat jazzy arrangements are deceptive, and there is some measure of dissonance between the music and the situation, as well as within the music itself that doesn't offer any optimistic outcome. At the end, Sam and Dinah don't so much make-up or even just put their differences aside as brush them under the carpet, going to see 'Trouble in Tahiti', where they can live the American dream on the screen at least.

Directed by Matthew Eberhardt, Opera North's production is itself a Hollywood musical come to life, a stylised all-American dream whose artificial glamour is cardboard thin, the ideal of the less than ideal sustained by the seductive croon emanating from the voices on the radio, from the poster on the wall, from the image on the screen. The singing is just outstanding, from those jazz harmonies of the trio chorus (Fflur Wyn, Joseph Shovelton and Nicolas Butterfield), to the conflicted self-assurance needed by Sam and Dinah that is brought out in the fine lead performances of Quirijn de Lang and Wallis Giunta. Tobias Ringborg brings a wonderful flow to those smooth arrangements with a hint of trouble (in Tahiti) beneath the surface.

Links: Opera North, OperaVision