The Times, Tuesday, 23 May 2006

World premier of Sante, 24 May 2006, ****

Geoff Brown

Father disapproves of his daughter's lover. All hell is let loose. The synopsis could serve for many operas. Tchaikovsky's Mazepa covers the territory in three and a half hours. Sante, generated by the Genesis Opera Project, mounted by the London Sinfonietta and Aldeburgh Productions, whisks through in 59 minutes.

This length seems just right for a young composer new to the genre, and Emily Hall -- the winner of last year's Royal Philharmonic Society composition award -- doesn't waste a second. She and her librettist Kit Peel tell an urgent, painful tale, set during the Rwanda genocide in the spring of 1994. Sante, a Hutu villager, is in love with Obietsu, a Tutsi travelling salesman Her surrogate father, the village priest, urges upon her a local man, Anastase, a Hutu militant. Violence spreads; the last scenes bring a forced marriage, a rape and a death.

No surprises in the plot, or the plain words of Peel's libretto. They fuse nonetheless with Hall's music to create powerful sequences of foreboding and terror. Hall's ensemble is individual: clarinet, two trombones, single strings, electric and bass guitars, an accordion. Their sounds come in two chief categories, the atmospheric blur and the dramatic stab; African elements are used lightly.

Some of these effects are overdone: repeated notes plucked from guitar or harp are a blunt weapon of expression. You might also wish for larger drops of lyrical phrasing, at least to lubricate the singers. Yet Hall need only tighten the screws slightly for music and drama to explode; the finale's rhythmic stamping and ugly thrusts prove devastating for everyone.

Performances, Philip Walsh's conducting and Tim Supple's staging? All to the point. A tree; a cross; a Sante worth rooting for (Yannick-Muriel Noah); an Anastase (Rodney Clarke) of fearful power. Joey Masemola's Obietsu needed more heft, but it wasn't crucial. The big news is simple. Youth is on the march, making and singing a dynamic new opera, worth everyone's time and hopes.

The Guardian, Friday, 26 May 2006

World premier of Sante, Wednesday May 24, 2006, ***

Erica Jeal

Sante is the first opera by young composer Emily Hall and librettist Kit Peel. A fruit of Aldeburgh's Genesis Opera Project, which brought this rookie team together with experienced director Tim Supple, it goes to the Suffolk festival next month.

Peel has drawn on his journalistic background to provide a concise narrative for this 75-minute work. Its setting - rural Rwanda during the genocide of 1994 - carries a certain responsibility. But its real subject is a story of thwarted love of the kind that writers have been re-creating for centuries.

Hall's music, expertly performed by nine members of the London Sinfonietta under Philip Walsh, is sparsely scored, coloured with accordion and, especially, harp. There are suggestions of the soundworld of African music, but no more than that; Hall is no musical tourist, though she seems more confident writing for the players than for the singers.

The opera starts with the buzz of an untuned radio; a potent symbol considering that propaganda played such a role in Rwanda's tragedy. On stage, however, the hateful speech played on a battered 1980s wireless - hanging from a white cross representing the church in Ti Green's simple, evocative set - seems merely to reinforce decisions already made. There is little illustration of how hatred could spread so insidiously among normal people.

But do Hall and Peel intend to attempt an exploration of the genocide, or is the love story their priority? It's the former that sticks in the mind, but this is partly down to the individual performances. Yannick-Muriel Noah has expressive presence in the title role, but Joey Masemola is too stilted to be convincing as her lover. The strongest performance is from Rodney Clarke as Anastase, the Hutu agitator driven by desire for Sante.

The final scene, Anastase's thugs banging their machetes on the stage loud enough to make the audience flinch, is perhaps clumsily brutal, but it is hard to imagine what else it could be. It certainly makes an impact - and for a first opera, that's a good start.

Opera Magazine

Stephen Pettitt

"An impressively promising first opera"