Last Updated on September 20, 2025
The First Cut is the Deepest
The Jette Parker Artists Programme is a course for the top tier of young opera singers, ballet dancers and directors about to embark upon their professional careers. The successful applicants are embedded for two years into the Royal Opera and Royal Ballet companies with the artists often performing in supporting roles on the main stage at Covent Garden. The scheme also creates productions at the Royal Opera House’s studio space the Linbury Theatre giving the singers the chance to take on leading roles and the directors the chance to flex their creative muscles.
I’m reviewing an intriguing pair of thematically and musically linked chamber opera rarities produced by the Jette Parker scheme; Bohuslav Martinu’s one-act opera from 1928 Larmes de Couteau (translated as The Tears of the Knife or Slzy noze in the original Czech and yes it’s the year of Czech music if you didn’t know) with a libretto by Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes, and American composer, conductor and teacher John Harbison’s 1977 Full Moon in March, an adaptation of a W.B. Yeats play of the same name.
Larmes de Couteau was originally a radio commission from the Baden-Baden Contemporary Music Festival which rejected the piece which then didn’t receive its premiere until after Martinu’s death. The libretto flirts with Dada and Absurdism with the music showing an early jazz and blues influence, prevalent in European art music at the time of composition. There is café style accordion, spiky banjo and ragtime-influenced and pounding Bartokian piano in a musical mix that juxtaposes the atonal with some slightly deranged dance forms giving it a cartoonish, slapstick quality.
The opera is a dreamlike Freudian mish-mash of unconscious and conscious desires for death and control. The narrative tells the story of Eléonore, Transylvanian soprano Valentina Puskás, who is in love with the corpse of a man who has been hanged. Eléonore’s mum (La Mère), played by Cameroonian/Ugandan-American mezzo Veena Akama-Makia, is keen that her daughter marries their neighbour Mr. Saturn – actually Satan – whose advances she turns down. The two young Jette Parker female leads act their socks off, entering into the dark humour of the piece. Veena Akama-Makia is a powerful presence with an attractively warm tone, but her lower register often gets lost behind the quirky orchestration. Puskás delivers the requisite level of passion with her tongue firmly in her cheek with a voice that is technically sound and hints at the promise of the great romantic lead roles. After failing to bring her beloved back to life, Eléonore commits suicide. The corpse is miraculously resuscitated and restores Eléonore to the land of the living, only to discover that her saviour is also Satan.
With his fine dramatic baritone and sinuous physicality, it is Edmund Danon, here as Satan, who steals the show in both operas. Decked out in a powder blue suit, top hat, foppish bow tie and snakeskin boots. After trying to bring her beloved back to life, Eléonore commits suicide. The corpse is miraculously resuscitated and returns Eléonore to the land of the living, only to discover that her saviour is also Satan.
Director Eleanor Burke extracts plenty of humour from the piece; there’s a robotic Hoover cleaning the stage, the bride arrives in a cardboard box courtesy of a delivery boy and the accordionist is dressed up in a teddy bear outfit, with designer Anna Reid setting the piece in a Bridal Services shop. A table is festooned with cake and macarons, there’s a floral display, wedding dresses and a row of male legs hanging down provocatively. Dancer Liam John Hill does a lovely turn taken from the Bob Fosse School of Dance contributing to what was a diverting, amusing and profoundly silly way to spend twenty-five minutes.
Yeats’s Full Moon in March is a work full of Celtic mystery, ritual and symbolism. A swineherd, Edmund Danon again but this time in a filthy vest, attempts to win the then hand of a Virgin Queen through the power of song. Danon is vocally commanding in the role bringing a macho sense of power and dynamism to the stage. Veena Akama-Makia as the Queen is engulfed in white chiffon, clutching a teddy bear and silver sceptre with multicoloured hair braids and a floral headpiece adding colour. Akama-Makia is much more commanding vocally in this part which sits more in her upper register.
The Queen has the pungent pig protector decapitated and then the Queen’s shadow (Boxer) Aisha Weise-Forbes does an assertive boxing dance to celebrate her power and autonomy. Harbison’s transparently lean Stravinskian score and eerie orchestration are driven forward by the exotic sonorities of a John Cageian prepared piano, and the polyrhythmic propulsions of a marimba and tuned tomtoms.
Two royal attendants bookend the work, mostly singing in unison octaves and functioning as a Greek chorus. They are decked out in matching patent leather boots, scarlet jackets, and red tartan trousers giving them the air of refugees from the production of Cabaret playing down by the river. Valentina Puskás brings sass and an immaculate technique to the vocally challenging role of the First Attendant, with her male counterpart being sung by British-born tenor Jonah Halton who brings a stylized passion to the stage both vocally and dramatically.
Conductor Edward Reeve makes the most of the modest orchestral resources at his disposal with the musicians of the Britten Sinfonia and the band never felt underpowered in the bijou Linbury space. I enjoyed these two productions. It felt as if Harbison’s Yeats setting had been pulled more into the world of the Martinu, but it made for a coherent experience with some fine singing from these young guns and this quirky double bill is worth a visit.
Larmes de Couteau / Full Moon in March
Linbury Theatre
Royal Opera House
Bow Street
London WC2E 9DD
26 April–4 May 2024
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