A northern Venice
Alderney bathed in the splendour of Venice last weekend as the fifth Performing Arts Festival punted off. Top-notch opera singers and musicians mingled with folk and rock singers and even a brace of jam-jar fairies for three days of musical entertainment, as Emma Pinch reports
AROUND a dozen events unfolded in the atmospheric environs of Alderney's Victorian forts for the late May bank holiday's Performing Arts Festival, culminating in a splendid Opera Gala in St Anne's Church.
The weekend kicked off with a Son et Lumiere – a vibrant performance by Gabby Young and her band in the courtyard of Chateau L'Etoc. It also marked the first outing of the weekend by light and design virtuosos, Limbic Cinema.
Expectations heightened as darkness gathered.
Mermaid-esque and kookily charismatic, Gabby – blue hair, swathed sea green tulle which lit up – channelled the emotional intensity of Florence Welch, her rich, throaty vocals lamenting the passage of time and celebrating togetherness. Impressive.
The evening chill sharpened, but it was the debut of Limbic Cinema that sent shivers up the spine. The granite walls of the chateau seemed to come alive, at first with a creeping zigzag of white light spreading like a crack through the mortar between the stones and then the stones themselves – individually and collectively – blushed and rippled. It was not an imposition of light and colour but an exposition, as if a limitless range of colour, motion and shape were inherent in the walls themselves, to be brought out at the touch of an iPad.
The highlight of the weekend, arguably, was Glitz, Glamour and Gondoliers – an operatic feast under the soaring arches of St Anne's Church.
'In for a treat' was organiser Caroline Kay-Mouat's introductory billing for this show and a treat it was for a packed church, with four vocal performers and a pianist, all of prodigious calibre and experience, giving a richly varied programme of operatic pieces that included some old friends like Barcarolle and O Sole Mio from the Contes d'Hoffmann and Libiamo from La Traviata, along with some lesser-known works, balancing the tragic with the comic and the weighty with the frivolous. This was lent a supporting visual element by the creative genius of the Limbic Cinema whose mobile imagery, projected on to the walls of the chancel and sanctuary arches and the curve of the sanctuary apse, offered an ever-changing background of soft shapes and liquid light.
