Georg Friedrich Haas Atthis and Matthew Rogers The Virtues of Things, The Linbury Studio, Royal Opera House, London

Extract

The Linbury Studio Theatre at the Royal Opera House in London has hosted an impressive range of intimate experimental music theatre works over the last few years. The 2014/15 season, for example, has featured prominent premieres of new works by Harrison Birtwistle and David Harsent, and a ballet staging of John Adams' Shaker Loops, amongst a range of other interesting concerts and shows. The late-April premiere run of Matthew Rogers's The Virtues of Things and an early-May staging by Netia Jones of Georg Friedrich Haas's song-cycle on fragments of Sappho, Atthis, showed how well the Royal Opera uses the smaller space and shorter runs common to the Linbury to programme in quick succession such distinctive pieces from across the spectrum of contemporary music. Atthis, which I attended on 24 April 2015, was perhaps the more intriguing of these two shows, since in conception and execution it was so bold; though Virtues has its own qualities, to which I'll get in a moment.