What is in Kelvin's Head?

The Sloans Project – Opera Review

21/08/2013

Rating:

This review also appears on Opera Britannia’s website.

The Sloans Project is an exciting new opera that has been around for a couple of years but is revived for this year’s Edinburgh Fringe. This performance was one of two being given in its original setting – the Glasgow public house from which its stories derive. It now moves over to Edinburgh in a brave attempt to relocate a piece which has hitherto been regarded as absolutely site specific and tied to its origins. The Sloans Project is an innovative and gripping piece and deserves to succeed in any setting. All parts were played by a quartet of singers accompanied by half a dozen musicians.

We begin, of course, in the bar. Arriving in Sloans on a Wednesday afternoon, it was not immediately obvious that there was any performance scheduled at all. It was simply an old bar room filled with locals drinking. A young chap (in fact the composer, Gareth Williams) sat at the bar with a glass of water and a musical score in front of him, but that was the only clue that a performance was in the offing at all. Suddenly though, he dipped his finger in the water and started circling the glass, making it sing. As he did so, other previously unnoticed members of the company dotted around the bar began to do the same. In moments the whole bar seemed to be singing its own ringing, gathering chord. A woman then appeared through the door and began to sing. It was an electric beginning to a piece which was full of drama.

The Project is not a continuous narrative. Rather, it is a series of five scenes drawn from stories connected with the bar. Three characters re-occur from the first scene in the last, bringing some kind of conclusion to proceedings and the audience is guided from room to room, up and downstairs to a different location for each scene by a Landlady who turns out to be something of a narrator figure. The scenes are drawn from different periods in the history of Sloans. (more…)

Gareth Williams, Glasgow bar, opera, sloans

6 responses to “Here or there?”

Gary

01/04/2007

Up there. High altar. No doubt.

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Tom Allen

01/04/2007

I am very much with Richard Giles on this one – there should liturgically only be one main altar – ideally this is achieved by romoving the former High altar and dedicating that space to some other purpose – where that is not possible as in historic cathedrals then it should be left dormant (covered in a simple cloth perhaps) and only the altar which is being used for worship should be dressed since this is in fact THE altar.

Despite all the reservations about removing former altars in the end it solves long-term problems, and provides a single visual focus for Eucharistic worship. At times when a high altar is needed then the new altar can moved there.

This kind of fuzziness illustrates that our liturgical practice has become dominated by hertiage criteria.

I am about to replace our main altar with something moveable and aesthetically more appropriate, but am facing a Registrars ruling that the current altar (and former eastward facing number more recently provided with wheels and moved to the chancel!) must be burnt, and that the wood frontal cannot be used for a screen.

Dont’ we get ourselves tied up in knots!
Tom

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Stewart

01/04/2007

A thought came to my mind this afternoon. At the Creed we all face east. This results in the choir turning their back on the Nave Altar and in most cases put the High Altar in their sight.

Considering Tom’s comments, another thought thinking about some English Cathedrals which have multiple altars around the building, it is not usually possible to see more than one at a time. Some have a chapel behind the High Altar – behind a screen.

Turning back to St Mary’s – all the action at the 10:30 service is centred and focused around the Nave Altar. However there is still the High Altar, the Pheobe Traquair Reredos and Gwyneth Leach mural of Our Lady at the East End. To my mind their presence enhances the worship around the Nave Altar and does not detract from it.

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Andrew

02/04/2007

The Altar is a table, where we commemorate a meal together. Clearly (to my mind) we should all be sitting round it, as we do (more or less) at present. The table reminds me that Jesus instituted the Last Supper when he was among us (HERE), not somewhere else (THERE).

I very much hope that the Altar in St. Mary’s can be left where it is.

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kelvin

03/04/2007

It seems to me curious that the practice that I inherited was to light and dress the high altar whilst using the nave altar. It makes no sense, except perhaps to highlight St Mary’s puzzling parallel worlds of deep conservatism mingled with radical liberalism.

Whist tending to agree with Andrew’s sentiments, it is worth remembering that the nave altar could hardly be said to have stayed in one place these last 20 years.

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Elizabeth

17/04/2007

Here. Both. Loving the paradox.

But maybe I only say that beccause the only church I’ve regularly worshiped in where there are clearly two visible altars is St Mary’s and that’s what I’m used to. I’ve never found it distracting that the high altar is dressed and lit, even though the nave altar is where the action is, so to speak. But then, would I notice if the high altar wasn’t dressed and lit? Probably not.

I do love the nave altar, peripatetic as it is!

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