Pocket Opera

Up to the dingy College St.Joseph at Poitiers (pop. 52,633) last week rattled a dusty blue Renault bus. Three singers, a dancer, a pianist, an announcer and the driver got out, unloaded a few pieces of battered scenery and a stork's-nest snarl of electronic equipment. Inside the college's assembly hall the announcer (who doubles as electrician) checked the lights while the performers dotted scenery around the bare stage. Within an hour the seven-member pocket opera company was proving again what it had already shown in 148 other stops of its tour through the French provinces: the liveliest lyric drama in France today comes not from the creaky, crustaceous old Paris Opera, or even from the more lighthearted Opera-Comique, but from the weary Renault.

Impresario-Composer Marcel Landowski* has turned the trick largely by carrying a big opera orchestra (the excellent ensemble of Paris' Societe des Concerts du Conservatoire) around with him on a tape machine.

The company's main attraction is Landowski's own one-acter. The Ventriloquist, which tells the story of a voice-thrower whose soul is tormented by two dummies representing love and hate. The tape-recorded orchestra accompanies the singers in fantasy scenes while a piano takes over during the here-and-now sequences. (Another of the company's productions, Gian Carlo Menotti's The Telephone, is accompanied entirely by piano.) The tape machine makes for some difficulties; e.g., singers sometimes have a hard time synchronizing their voices with the tape, and occasionally there are rests not written in the score before the tape picks up again after a piano passage. But gifted Composer Landowski. who has also written movie music (Gigi) and a prize-winning symphony, is sure that his gimmick can do for audiences what Paris' relatively expensive opera ($5.70 top) and France's second-rate provincial stages cannot do. Enthusiastic audiences all along his tour seem to agree.

Currently, Impresario Landowski is planning to expand his company's repertory (possibly including a new opera by Composer Landowski), expects to tour in Canada next year. Says one French paper: "This is how opera can regain its public."

* No kin to Harpsichordist Wanda Landowska.

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