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Baa Baa Black Sheep
Vocal score on hire
978-0-19-335278-0
22 July 1993
Price: Available on request
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An opera in three acts based on Rudyard Kipling's Baa Baa Black Sheep and The Jungle Book. Libretto by David Malouf, and piano reduction by Susan Bradshaw. Forces or CategorySoli, SATB chorus of 8 singers and orchestraDuration120 minutesDifficultyModerately difficultOrchestrationfl (+picc&afl), ob (+ca), cl (+bcl), bn (cbn), 2 tpt, 2 hn, 3 tbn, hp, perc, pn,
strProgramme NotesThis opera, to a text by a distinguished Australian novelist David Malouf, is based on the autobiographical short story by Rudyard Kipling. It describes how, as young children, Kipling and his sister were brought to England from India and sent to live with a retired ship's Captain, his fanatical wife (Auntie Rosa) and their bully of a son, Harry.
Auntie Rosa took violently against Kipling and the boy was constantly beaten. In his short story, Kipling constantly referred to his new abode as the House of Desolation, and called himself Punch, and his sister Judy.
This childhood experience marked Kipling for life and explains a great deal of his later writing -
the often terrifying elements of revenge, for example, and of course the escape offered by fantasy. In Something of Myself, Kipling acknowledged that it was during this ordeal that he first thought about children living amongst animals.
The opera marries up these two ideas using those elements of The Jungle Book that quite naturally seem to comment psychologically on the child's predicament. Each of the other characters from one world has its counterpart in the other, and thus a comparison of human and animal behaviour is drawn. So, for instance, the bully, Harry, becomes Mowgli's arch-enemy in the jungle, the tiger Sheer Khan.
David Malouf has further endowed the child with the power to effect his own 'wild justice' - a power borne of the imagination which was itself
the product of abuse and the need to escape it.
© Michael Berkeley
Reproduced by permission of Oxford University Press
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Michael Berkeley (b.1948) Michael Berkeley was born in 1948. He studied composition, singing, and piano at the Royal Academy of Music but it was not until his late twenties, when he went to study with Richard Rodney Bennett, that Berkeley began to concentrate exclusively on composing. In 1977 he was awarded the Guinness Prize for Composition; two years later he was appointed Associate Composer to the Scottish Chamber Orchestra. Since then Michael's music has been played all over the globe and by some of the world's finest musicians. Most of Michael's significant orchestral work, much of his chamber music and his operas are available on CD as part of the Chandos Berkeley Edition. For ten years from 1995
Michael was artistic director of the Cheltenham International Festival of Music. He currently presents Radio 3's Private Passions, which won the Broadcasting Press Guild's Radio Programme of the Year Award in 1996, and is Chairman of the Governors of The Royal Ballet.Michael Berkeley's website
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"Baa Baa Black Sheep proved to be a more substanial, sympathetic and redemptive piece than I'd imagined possible...the clash of East vs West feeds purposefully into the score, which turnes on two conflicting sound worlds...probably the most successful recent, smaller-scale contemporary opera." - Michael White, The Independent on Sunday "No need for ifs and buts: Baa Baa Black Sheep is a hearteningly successful new opera, and Michael Berkeley surely the most engaging operatic talent to have emerged since Judith Weir...A major event, I think." - Rodney Milnes, The Times "Berkeley's score is always engaging to the ear. His finely tuned sense of instrumental colour is lushly exploited in music which
evokes the sights and sounds of the jungle with marvellous use of woodwinds, tuned percussion, Indian-sounding instruments, and an electronic synthesiser. The worlds of stiff Victorian England and the India to which Punch longs to return are starkly differentiated: Auntirosa's austere regime, with frequent birchings, calls forth a dissonant, grey music, which the jungle vibrates with sumptuous colour.
It is impossible to do justice to such a complex, multi-layered work in a single notice, but Baa Baa Black Sheep is a real opera and one which I hope to return to." - Hugh Canning, The Sunday Times
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The specification in this catalogue, including without limitation price, format, extent, number of illustrations, and month of publication, was as accurate as possible at the time the catalogue was compiled. Occasionally, due to the nature of some contractual restrictions, we are unable to ship a specific product to a particular territory. Jacket images are provisional and liable to change before publication.
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