Funny music is notoriously hard to write, and comic opera is one of the trickiest of any artistic genres to pull off. There are blessed few operas even in the standard repertoire that are genuinely funny, not just amusing, and even fewer among modern operas. The modern approach seems generally to be to take a clever or even actually funny libretto and accompany it with zany music. Such is largely the case with John Musto's Bastianello, with a libretto by Mark Campbell. Musto writes skillfully and gratefully for the voice, ...
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Funny music is notoriously hard to write, and comic opera is one of the trickiest of any artistic genres to pull off. There are blessed few operas even in the standard repertoire that are genuinely funny, not just amusing, and even fewer among modern operas. The modern approach seems generally to be to take a clever or even actually funny libretto and accompany it with zany music. Such is largely the case with John Musto's Bastianello, with a libretto by Mark Campbell. Musto writes skillfully and gratefully for the voice, but the two-piano accompaniment is almost incessantly manic. The vocal lines, even when the music is slow, are usually accompanied by running eighth or sixteenth note figures. In small doses the music can have a Poulenc-like wit (the trio "Life, life...so sad, so sad..." for instance), but the nearly relentlessly busy music loses any humor it might have had for lack of contrast. The moments that do break the rush of notes, such as the beginning of the unaccompanied pseudo-Renaissance...
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