Amy Beach's Cabildo is a more genuinely 'chamber opera' than most: it is scored for six singers and a speaker, a small chorus and a piano trio. It lasts three quarters of an hour, but has ample room for a naturalistic Prologue (a group of present-day tourists are being shown around the Cabildo, the colonial prison in New Orleans from which a famous pirate once escaped in mysterious circumstances), a dream sequence (in which one of the tourists sees the pirate in his cell, the plans for his escape and his anguish at the death of the woman he loves) and a ghostly appearance (the pirate's lover returns from a watery grave to urge him to seek honour, not revenge). It is very cleverly written, the piano trio never sounding like a stand-in for an absent orchestra; often, indeed, a single instrument is used, and very evocatively too. The music makes abundant but shrewdly varied use of Creole songs: relatively straight, and in a light-hearted drawing-room (or ballroom) style for the Prologue, more radically transformed in the dream sequence. Both halves of the opera have a love duet: a pretty, innocently lyrical one (with a tango-like rhythm) for the newly wed tourists; something much closer to a post-Brahmsian Lied for the pirate and the ghostly Lady Valerie.
I could have done without Lady Valerie, to tell you the truth: her music is pallid, and the librettist (who is altogether too fond of 'thee' and 'thou' as intimate modes of address) has lumbered her with a faintly bathetic patriotic message (''Thy debt is not to vengeance... Pay thy debt to America!'' – she wants him to help General Jackson to kick the British out of Louisiana). But the rest of the piece is eventful, intriguing and eminently stageworthy: I should be very surprised if music colleges don't take it up.
Vocally speaking this performance is only modest; in particular the role of the pirate, Pierre Lafitte, is several sizes too large for Eugene Perry. The quite admirable instrumentalists make up for a good deal, however, and with the excellent Christopher O'Riley as pianist five of the other singers give a pretty good idea of Beach's range as a song-writer: at times post- or sub-Brahms, at times drawing-room balladish, but often, as in the opera, with a touch of strength and individuality, not least in flights of adventurous, surprising modulation. The recordings are clean and natural.'