10 show talents with Walton

Walton’s Façade (1922‑23), especially in its long version, can feel like prolonged exposure to a feather duster when you’re not in a ticklish mood.
Edith Sitwell’s brittle wit lacks the brilliance of, say, Noël Coward. When the narrators’ voices are over-amplified at the expense of the music, as here, the work becomes less than the parts of its sum.

But many love it. This performance, conducted by Dominic Grier, was crisp and agile. Thomas Guthrie and Hilary Brennan put all their impressive, articulate energy into the 21 tongue-twisting poems, which are hard to tell apart. Often all you can identify is girls’ names, Daisy and Lily, Jemima, Jocasta, Lucia, Menuccia, Dinah and Deb, barked out in a perfectly enunciated rap. Think Jay-Z styled by Nancy Mitford.

The Southbank Sinfonia and Grier had more chance to display their expertise in the voluptuous, cleverly referential score of The Bear, nimbly directed by Guthrie.

Monika-Evelin Liiv, a velvet-toned Estonian mezzo, the ardent Lithuanian bass‑baritone Kostas Smoriginas and South African bass Vuyani Mlinde are a talented trio, even if their clotted, incomprehensible English was crying out for those cut-glass Home Counties vowels.

This 1960s comic opera, from Chekhov, is timely: a landowner demands money owed from a widow, "to pay off the interest on his mortgage".

Temperatures rise. Instead of killing each other they lay down arms and fall into a long kiss. It’s an ingenious solution to a credit crisis.

Tomorrow and Friday 7pm. Information: 020 7304 4000.

Jette Parker Young Artists: Facade, The Bear
Royal Opera House
Floral Street, WC2E 9DD