Almeida Opera 2005 The Cricket Recovers

We twinkle like the stars

   and we glitter like the river.

We're bubbling and rustling

   and buzzing and bustling...

Richard Ayres' opera brings to the stage cult Dutch writer Toon Tellegen's animal stories.

The Cricket wakes up one morning with a gloomy feeling in his head and doesn't know what it is, or how it got there. The elephant can't stop climbing trees, and he has to find a way to kick the habit. Both animals undertake a journey of personal discovery - seeking the opinions of friends, consulting quacks, and surviving dangerous cures, evil nocturnal visits and psychedelic visions.

Tellegen's deceptively simple tales are explorations of grief, joy and the immediacy of life.

Ayres' is a major new voice in contemporary music, a 'manic mélange of the familiar and strange' (Musical Times). He was featured at the 2000 Aldeburgh Festival and 2004's Huddersfield Festival. Surrealist animators the Quay Brothers and Music Theatre London founderer Nicholas Broadhurst accompany. His regular collaborator, Roland Kluttig, conducts.

"dazzlingly beautiful...immersed in a surreal, somnolent atmosphere caught halfway between myth and nightmare"

on the the work of the Quay Brothers