Laura Karpman’s 2017 opera Balls, whose new orchestral version was the main event of yesterday’s concert, lasts just 45 minutes, prompting Marin Alsop and the Philharmonia Orchestra to seek an appropriate piece for a first half. They chose William Walton’s Façade, written a century earlier for a salon at the home of the aristocratic poet Edith Sitwell.
Façade mates words by Sitwell to an ensemble of two cellos, percussion and half a dozen wind players. I can only describe it as one of the oddest piece I’ve ever heard in a concert hall – and certainly the silliest. There are 19 verses lasting a couple of minutes each. The words are glorious sounding nonsense, making the piece somewhat like listening to 40 minutes of Edward Lear. Three of the Balls cast members wrapped their tongues around phrases like “They answer to the names of ancient dames and shames” and “This melon, Sir Mammon, Comes out of Babylon: By for a patacoon – Sir, you must buy!” with relish. Nikola Printz provided American pizzazz, Lotte Betts-Dean excelled in plummy upper class Englishness, while Nicky Spence exuded raised eyebrows and delight in every syllable. Some of the numbers were revved up to to maximum tongue-twisting speed – one senses that if Sitwell and Walton had known about rap, they would have adored it.
With just nine musicians, they all had plenty of moments in the limelight to contribute to the wicked sense of humour in all manner of pastiche styles, from Pasodoble to pastoral. The piece felt too long; by the half hour mark, it all felt “more of the same”, but it made a fun curtain-raiser.
Balls is probably the only opera ever written about a game of tennis: in this case, the 1973 “Battle of the Sexes” in which Billie Jean King trounced the male chauvinist Bobby Riggs, 25 years her senior, who had blustered that no woman could possibly beat a man. For an opera fan who still plays competitive tennis and was watching King as far back as the 1960s, Balls was always going to be a must-see, and a suitable touch of stardust was added by a video introduction by Billie Jean herself, looking and sounding in great shape for her 82 years.
Karpman’s music lacks nothing for energy and variety and was played with verve by Alsop and the Philharmonia. Karpman may be principally a film composer, but she can certainly pull out the operatic stops in her vocal writing, shown most brightly in the arias given to the 19th-century suffragette Susan B. Anthony, sung potently by soprano Eve Pearson Maxwell. There was also operatic angst aplenty for Printz as she portrayed King’s unshakable determination to win in anything she does, be it a tennis match or the ignition of the women’s rights movement in sport. There are lashings of Broadway-style showpieces, whose main beneficiary was Spence, who incarnated Riggs superbly as a swaggering but rather good-natured braggart and hustler (the real Riggs and King became good friends after the match).
Emma Doherty directed an imaginative semi-staging with a video backdrop that integrated some of the live action into stills, newsreels and some truly toe-curling 1970s commercial video (the Virginia Slims “you’ve come a long way baby” advert is a particularly ghastly memory). Generally, it was engaging and effective, although it was a disappointment to tennis fans that nobody made a serious attempt to teach Printz or Spence how to play a shot.
The semi-staging founders on two things. The first is Gail Collins’ libretto. First, the tennis scorelines are all wrong: words like “deuce”, “fault”, “set point” are scattered about in no particular order, losing the way the scoring system can impart drama to what might otherwise be a humdrum match. But more importantly, Collins doesn’t trust the story to tell her political message and therefore feels the need to remind the audience at regular intervals of how important this all was to women’s rights, turning a piece of drama into a lecture.
Secondly, ham-fisted amplification made the music – particularly the voices – unpleasant. It was fine early on, but as the show proceeded, the volume was wound up to the point where even a single soprano – either Printz or Pearson Maxwell, both of whom have lovely high notes – became harsh and distorted. In the last quarter of the show, when the ensemble and chorus joined in at full volume, the sound became painfully ear-splitting, spoiling the good impressions made up to that point.
We’ve seen the pattern of “not enough show, too much tell” in several recent operas about worthy political causes. Getting the balance right between entertaining the audience and hammering home a political message is probably harder than hitting a serve past Billie Jean King. Balls, I’m afraid, tries too hard and misses the service box.
