In these austere times, what could be better than to turn a single work into three separate ones?

I’ve been lucky enough to have various pieces of music written for me over the last few years and am always on the lookout for ways to extend their life and range. Getting the first performance is relatively straightforward, the second more difficult and many new works get no further than that. So, at the moment I’m working to convert A Voice of One Delight – a piece originally written as a concert work – into a fully-staged monodrama.

Firstly, the instrumentation is changing from flute, harp and viola to piano, with soundtrack as part of a video, so the sound palette will be completely different. Secondly, I have agreed with the composer that although I won’t change the music, the spoken text is up for grabs.

The original A Voice of One Delight uses a single contemporary account describing the events around the death at sea of the Romantic poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and the cremation of his body on a nearby beach. One possibility is to open up the spoken narrative to multiple sources. After all, Lord Byron, Mary Shelley and various other writers and diarists were in Italy with Shelley at the time of his death and offer a range of comment in their private correspondence and published work. But I’m the only performer, so how many dead literary celebrities can I realistically hope to represent in half an hour? All this is still under discussion.

The need to investigate these options has given me a great reason finally to join the British Library and I have been a regular in the Rare Books Room for the last couple of weeks, ploughing through the amazing range of primary sources that I now have access to. My director and dramaturg on this project is Joe Austin, a friend made in the course of two operas in which he has directed me, and who is racing back and forth between London and Leeds (Opera North) in order to work on our project.

We have been given two confirmed performance dates in August to show our work as part of Tête à Tête: The Opera Festival, so we now have to get our skates on to complete the re-write and then rehearse it to readiness. The performances won’t generate a profit, as the Opera Festival prices are all pegged low so as to encourage people to support as many different shows as they can. However, we will get a high-quality video out of it, as well as the chance to invite promoters to the shows themselves and we have the benefit of Tête à Tête’s Audience Survey which explores in detail the public’s response to new work after each show. It’s a great opportunity to find out how the piece works in its new form, prior to offering it to small venues and Festivals. Hopefully this ‘austerity’ version will become the sort of touring show that can be packed away into a large suitcase and dusted off quickly when needed.

A third, much larger, version of the same piece is still at the planning stage with a separate company, but looks set to fly in 2013 as one half of a double-bill. Oh, and the original concert version will appear on a CD of Stephen McNeff’s music that I am recording with Champs Hill Records in October 2012.

Now that’s what I call getting your moneys’ worth.

For more information about August performances of A Voice of One Delight click here