Puppets on a sing

3rd February 1995, 12:00am

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Puppets on a sing

https://www.tes.com/magazine/archive/puppets-sing
Operavox: the animated operas, BBC2 Fridays 7.30-8.00pm, February 10 to March 17.

Michael Marland hails an animated attempt to bring opera to the masses.

An invitation to a night at the opera, or rather six nights to be exact, is being issued by BBC2 each Friday from February 10 to March 17. It is a marvellous gift to schools. Hard on the heels of the widely-regarded Animated Tales of Shakespeare, Christopher Grace (for S4C the Welsh Channel 4) has followed up with an equally successful translation of six major operas to full animation, condensed into half an hour each.

For years, opera has often been regarded by schools as a remote and elitist art form with little potential impact for the majority of children. This series is going to reverse that attitude with performances which cut across time, class and pre-conceptions to convey beauty and meaning to all ages, while enriching music at key stages 2, 3 and 4 at the same time.

Like the Animated Tales, each opera has an animated style chosen for its imaginative and technical match to the story and its setting. Christmas Films in Moscow has created brilliant puppet animation for The Barber of Seville (March 10), as has Bare Boards in Manchester for Rigoletto (February 24), where the characters are made of latex and can “breathe” as they sing. Three of the operas employ dazzling cell animation Turandot (March 17), for example, is heavily influenced by Chinese painting and calligraphy and Pizazz Pictures in Soho has broken technological ground by combining live action and computer animation for Carmen (February 10).

The different presentations are perfect examples of both the art and media aspects of the national curriculum Orders. The media section requires that “pupils should be introduced to a wide range of media. They should be given opportunities to analyse and evaluate such material, which should be of high quality and represent a range of forms and purposes”. In art, pupils are required to “identify how visual elements are used to convey ideas, feelings and meanings in images”. These six programmes chould be seen as an anthology specially designed to meet both these requirements.

Although the series could be regarded as “popularisation” there is absolutely no loss of aesthetic integrity. The music is superbly played and sung by the Welsh National Opera orchestra and chorus in the original orchestration. Although the music has been filleted down to 28 minutes, it remains authentic. Thus Bizet’s two-and-a-half hours of Carmen have been reduced without sounding in any way truncated. Indeed, it sounds beautifully right.

The words are translated clearly. Amanda Holden’s Carmen, for instance, is always pointed and stylish and even my five-year-old son Matthew could follow Wagner’s psychology in Rhinegold (March 3). In the first scene when the under-water monster Alberich threatens the nubile maidens above him, one of them sings back: “So you want love? Then catch me up here!” “I know that monster’s naughty,” Matthew said. “But that lady’s even more naughty!” For young audiences in particular the sense of the libretto comes across far more clearly than in the opera house because of the clarity of singing and the recording.

Animation distils the essence of the operatic art. It is a natural medium for opera. The start of The Magic Flute (February 17), for instance, makes it seem as if Mozart had been specially commissioned for the production and it is hard to imagine a more perfect serpent or Queen of the Night.

Operatic singing presents no awkwardness when married to animation. In fact, they appear designed for each other.

Michael Marland is headteacher of North Westminster Community School, London.

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