MUSIC: ***

STAGING: ****

Dafydd Jones as PT Barnum, Lylis O’Hara as Jenny Lind and Connor Dalton as Belletti | Photo: Chris Christodoulou

What’s the difference between ‘art’ and ‘entertainment’? Can you tell? And does it matter? These are age-old questions, and they resurrect in the American composer Libby Larsen’s opera Barnum’s Bird which had what I assume to be its British premiere during the summer in a student staging at the Royal College of Music.

Larsen wrote the piece back in 2000 on a chamber-scale – around a dozen voices, tiny orchestra – and based the story around Jenny Lind: the so-called Swedish Nightingale who became one of the most celebrated of mid-19^th Century singers. No recording of her voice survives, and some contemporary accounts suggest that it was flawed; but nonetheless she was a superstar, thanks to relentless marketing by the promoter PT Barnum who persuaded her to tour America and sold her there like soap powder.

The awkward marriage between Lind’s artistic principles and Barnum’s circus tactics is the issue Larsen takes as central to her piece. And it plays out in music where the worlds of European culture and American razzmatazz grind together – on terms somewhere between the cross-cultural sabotage of Ariadne auf Naxos and the Yankee cabaret of Stephen Sondheim’s Assassins: two stage works that come constantly to mind as Barnum’s Bird rolls out.

Unfortunately, Larsen’s musical invention doesn’t reach the heights of Sondheim, still less Richard Strauss. Her writing – broadly lyrical, off-Broadway easy-listening – largely comes in parodies of circus numbers and Victorian vaudeville songs, intercut with bleeding chunks of Mendelssohn, Bellini or Rossini (representing Lind’s recital repertoire). These disparate sources aren’t connected with great skill or subtletly: they’re just dropped side by side into the flow, announced by drum-rolls, whistles and the standard sonic business of the circus. And not much beyond the Mendelssohn/Bellini quotes is memorable. 

The cast of Barnum's Bird at the Royal College of Music | Photo: Chris Christodoulou

That said, Ella Marchment’s staging at the RCM worked hard to make the effervescence bubble and resulted in an upbeat show, exhaustingly alive with high-pitched, raucous energy. In a robustly cabaret-style presentation where most of the ensemble (dressed as circus grotesques) juggled roles and multi-tasked, the cast I witnessed were collectively adept, agile and striking – with a radiant cameo role from mezzo Charlotte Clapperton as Barnum’s short-statured attraction Tom Thumb. A fine young baritone, Connor Dalton, played Lind’s singing partner Belletti. Soprano Lylis O’Hara met the challenge of portraying an iconic singer head on, with warm, covered tone that enhanced a nicely judged sense of Lind’s uncertainty about surrendering her art to commerce. And the evidently rising tenor Dafydd Jones shone vocally as Barnum, clear and bright – although I’m not sure that the role itself was a good fit for him: he seemed too innocent to be a hustler.

With a valiant little pit band under Michael Rosewell, all this paid off: the performers threw their hearts and souls into the show. But whether Barnum’s Bird was worth their effort, I’m not sure. It ran for barely ninety minutes, but I wouldn’t rush to sit through it again.