Op of the shops

Jul 19 2007 Opera

The British obsession with shopping has inspired an opera which has its world premiere in Birmingham on Sunday. Its composer, Edward Rushton, talks to Terry Grimley.

Welcoming Edward Rushton's first opera The Young Man with the Carnation back in 2002, my colleague Christopher Morley described it as "one of the most enjoyable events I have covered in a third of a century of reviewing".

Since then, Zurich-based Rushton - still only in his mid-30s - has written no fewer than five more operas, by my arithmetic. I say this because the Trojan trilogy Birds. Barks. Bones., which won him the opera category of the British Composers Prize in 2005, incorporates two earlier pieces, Leinen aus Smyrna and Philoctetes.

All of Rushton's operas, apart from the first, have librettos by Dagny Gioulami, and their partnership has become so firmly established that they now share a website (www.gioulamirushton.net).

Their sixth opera, The Shops, commissioned by The Opera Group and the Bergenz Festival in Austria, has its world premiere at the CBSO Centre in Birmingham on Sunday.

So does all this mean opera has now become Rushton's speciality?

"In the last couple of years it has become that," he admits. "I'm very happy with that state of affairs, but it's more the way it's happened than by design. I hope I will have the pleasure of doing more concert music in future.

"At the moment I'm working on an opera for children - for an audience of children, not for children to perform - commissioned by Zurich Opera. Again that's with Dagny, and that's the last opera project we have on the go for now.

"After that I've got ideas about various pieces. I want to write a violin sonata, which funnily enough will be quite a theatrical piece."

Like its predecessors The Shops is conceived on a modest scale, scored for six singers and ten players, and running for about 90 minutes including a 20-minute interval.

Described as "part satire on rampant consumerism, part psychological thriller" it is a comic piece charting the increasingly audacious adventures of a privileged thief and featuring a dancing chorus of over-zealous shop assistants and a meeting of Shoppers Anonymous.

Its rapid-edit format spoofs the conventions of Hitchcock and the Pink Panther films, but why an opera about shopping?

"The last time Opera Group did Birds. Barks. Bones. we were over in England for rehearsals and Dagny was very much struck by the shopping culture in Britain.

"She's Swiss and has lived in Germany as well. Of course people go shopping in Switzerland, but it seems slightly different and more manic here than she was used to.

"So that was one idea, to write a piece about this obsessive relationship between fanatical work and dashing to the shops.

"That got mixed up with stories we had read about in the news, not just about shopping but the desire to have things you can't have by legal means.

"All these things related to the idea of wanting to possess things, and stealing is one way of getting hold of things you want."

In addition to his operas, Rushton has been commissioned to write music for a variety of ensembles, from the London Sinfonietta and London Symphony Orchestra to the Zurich Tonhalle Orchestra.

"He is regarded as one of the bright British talents of his generation, yet he has lived in Germany and Switzerland since 1996. How has that changed his perspective?

"It's interesting - I don't know how to answer that. On the artistic level, it's a very different scene, especially talking about composing music in Germany.

"I worked for two years over in Germany and the whole way they approach music-making is different. When I was growing up in the UK I was very much into what was happening on the contemporary music scene in the 90s and felt very much part of that, but you do look at it in a different way when you go to a different place."

He recalls showing an early piece of his to the conductor at the German theatre where he was working, and being taken aback by his response.

"He said a very interesting thing, which was that the problem with my music was that it was very eclectic.

"I didn't realise that in Germany the word 'eclectic' is a swear-word. To have someone say that in Germany, that's beyond the pale. My immediate reaction to that was what a load of rubbish, but I think that's a good thing, it's always good to question what you're doing.

"It keeps you on the ball as an artist. When I went over there in 1996 I realised that the British and German music worlds had nothing at all to do with each other.

"Now I think there's more new German music being performed here, not least because of Oliver Knussen's work. He's done a lot to bring these two countries together.

"Everyone in Germany has heard of Tom Ades, for example, just to take the most obvious example, and at the Bregenz Festival this year, where The Shops is being done four days after Birmingham, the whole contemporary part of the festival is devoted to British opera."

• The Opera Group, with Birmingham Contemporary Music Group, gives the world premiere of The Shops at the CBSO Centre on Sunday at 7.30pm (Box office: 0121 767 4050). Other UK venues on the tour include the Linbury Studio, Royal Opera House (Sep 19-22), Arts Theatre, Cambridge (Sep 23), Royal Northern College of Music, Manchester (Oct 4) and Oxford Playhouse (Oct 7).