Push Reviews

Here are some highlights of the amazing reviews Push! received. Where possible the original article is linked to .

***

"In their hugely enjoyable show Bruce and Reynolds give us not one but six very different childbirth episodes. [The show] made an excellent showcase of Bruce's mastery of different styles. The accompaniment (scored for a 13-strong chamber ensemble) mixed echoes of Britten, Looney Tunes and Janacek with an individual elan, and was consistently vivid and colourful. Bruce's writing for voice was also good...But - and this is what marks him out as a real operatic talent to watch - his management and musical texturing of stage ensemsble was exemplary, and he knew exactly when to let the music carry the emotional burden. For all the success of the madcap high-jinks, the best scene in the opera is a bittersweet love scene written with only a handful of words."

Opera Magazine, September 2006

"This was a dazzling show by any standards...Push! is simply brilliant from start to finish. But above all it's humane. Sensitive ideas cascade and catapult forth, but the most gleaming item of all is Bruce's fresh and original music, which from a small ensemble produces a wonderfully bizarre mix of the coherent and the unpredictable."

Roderic Dunnett, Opera Now, Nov/Dec 06

"[Bruce's] music for the 13-piece orchestra (conducted by Tim Murray) is an altogether richer amalgam, sometimes skittish, sometimes mournful, always deeply felt. At the ensemble's heart is the unlikely but ear-catching combination of bassoon, flute, clarinet and accordion, their contrasting colours woven together with deft assurance... Push! is that rare thing, a new opera that delivers."

Nick Kimberley, Evening Standard, 20 June 06

"Sometimes Bruce's writing comes close to operatic genius (a bittersweet love scene without words is very affecting) ...With a clutch of uniformly excellent performances, it makes for a consistently surprising, brilliantly inventive and fast-paced show."

Warwick Thompson, Metro, 21 June 06

"Bruce's score lived its own life, full of rapid rotating figures and quick-change colours, with a quirky tonality and a momentum that carried the show."

Robert Maycock, The Independent, 21 June 06

"Along the way we’ve been rocketed between social satire, rumbustious fantasy and the wonder of the ordinary, urged onwards by the dizzying score of David Bruce...Melodic and rhythmic fragments tumble out like a Looney Tunes soundtrack, chasing each other round squeaking winds, frantic strings, rude brass, keyboards, mouth-organ and accordion. Fun to play for the musicians, under the alert beat of the conductor, Tim Murray; equally fun to listen to"
Geoff Brown, The Times, 21 June 06

"Push! is a wonderfully entertaining small-scale piece of music theatre with a score by David Bruce and a libretto by Anna Reynolds...Bruce's score, conducted by Tim Murray, is buoyantly inventive...the versatile cast of eight performs with irresistible panache...Push! certainly delivers."

Rupert Chistiansen, Daily Telegraph, 23 June 06

"The shivering glissandi, below-the-stave moans, outraged expletives and spiked coloratura of the six labouring women...are the least radical part of Bruce and Reynolds' creation. More interesting is the way they capture the multiple ambiguities of those long moments before one's life changes forever, and found something of every woman in six tightly scored vignettes.

With shades of Janacek, Piazzola and Britten, a rich amniotic wash of muted brass, piano and woodwind, and fricative stirrings from the accordion, strings and percussion, Bruce has imagined the unknowable soundworld of the unborn child....Push! is a remarkable work: wise, sympathetic and frequently hilarious."

Anna Picard, Sunday Telegraph, 25 June 06

" It is an affecting moment when the caretaker sits up with the baby (a flashing jelly baby in an incubator) that will die. The beautiful lamentation of the Angela scene follows, but the work moves to an affirmative close as the cleaner herself has a baby (with the caretaker), and the refrain becomes, as it were, the final verse. Miura rose to her occasion magnificently — but so did all the singers. They had much to spur them on, for what marks out the opera is the composer’s relish for warmly singable lines and the expressive possibility of ensembles. This is emphatically not a “sung play”. Reynolds’s text is, in any case, a model of concision.

Economy is the ruling principle of Bruce’s score for 13 players. With its dabs of accordion, hints of piano riff, one might take it at first for skilful Gebrauchsmusik (utility music), but then come piccolo-flashes of Janacek, violin descants that glisten significantly, subtly swelling brass and a touchingly unexpected use of recorders. (They give the work its final sounds.) There is depth here as well as surface, and a sense of tonal pacing that is more than merely “effective”. When Maddy sings of “loving no one, loved by none”, there is a chord change on the last word to clinch the matter."

Paul Driver, Sunday Times, 25 June 06

"Push, the brand-new opera by composer David Bruce and writer Anna Reynolds ... took the audience by the scruff of the ears and presented us with a vocal and visual treat that was a rich (and as nutty) as a fruitcake...

The richly comic and darkly tragic episodes are brilliantly told with a nice series of linking scenes involving a tentative romance between two hospital cleaners...

The highpoint of the whole piece was a solo aria by Louise Mott playing a mother who has lost her baby and was clinging on to his fading memory. The music soared with lyrical gorgeousness reminding one of the salty marsh sounds of early Britten...

The music was in turn audacious (some wonderful writing for cello, accordion and spiky piano), cheeky and at times softly mellow (and the composer is not afraid of letting the odd tune come bursting through). An astonishing melange of panto, Wagnerian grandeur and gut wrenching sadness, Push is likely to pull people towards contemporary opera, which let’s face it, desperately needs a re-birth."

Mike Levy, Local Secrets website

The following preview features on Push! are also available :
The Times: It's not over till the fat lady gives birth
The Independent: When the fat lady sings