British composer Lewis Coenen-Rowe premieres in Glasgow his fourth chamber opera, “Stumped”.
Stumped means “baffled”, “at a loss”, “bewildered”, “mystified”, “floored”, etc. but “stump” is also the lower end of a tree trunk left standing after the upper part falls or is cut off. With this pun, the young British composer Lewis Coenen-Rowe (Liverpool, 1993) has written a one-act opera, the fourth in his career – the previous ones being Collision (2016), The Storm (2017) and Last Thursday (2018) – which will be premiered this Friday 8 September, at 18:00, at the Brian Cox Theatre in Glasgow. An advocate for environmental sustainability and concerned about ecology, Coenen-Rowe explains on his website that he began campaigning “for fossil fuel divestment in 2015 and have become increasingly convinced by its importance as my involvement has increased. Back then I was experiencing a classic case of ‘eco-stress’, obsessively policing the environmental impacts of my own lifestyle and judging others for not doing the same while binge-reading news articles about the huge environmental impacts of large businesses that made my own actions feel pointless. I attended a couple of protests but was frustrated by not being able to feel a tangible outcome from them. I felt disempowered”.
Now a campaigner with activist group Divest Strathclyde, he has gone one step beyond by creating Stumped, an opera that “draws on five ancient cautionary myths about what happens when you cut down a tree and sets them against a backdrop of modern-day misinformation that attempts to frame deforestation as merely a ‘myth’.”
The premiere, which takes place in one of the main alternative venues in the Scottish city, will feature singers Shuna Sendall and Lea Shaw and instrumentalists Alice Rickards, Sonia Cromarty, Andrew Connell-Smith and Robyn Anderson, under the direction of Thomas Butler. The performance will be followed by a discussion with leading experts on nature and biology and how they have been interpreted by art and human narrative, including artist and forester Amy Clarkson, researcher Ophira Gamliel and Sally Clark of the non-profit organisation Biofuelwatch.