In December last year, I found myself in contact with the conductor, researcher and arranger Dario Salvi in connection with his recording of Meyerbeer's first opera, which was issued on Naxos Music Library [see my review]. We got chatting by email and the idea of a collaboration came up. Dario conducts a lot of 19th century ballet music and operetta [see his discography], and he had the idea of us collaborating on a contemporary operetta.
The result is Ademdai or The necessary and the superfluous with a plot is based on a tale from One Thousand and One Nights. The music is gradually working its way through our studies, in London and in Glasgow, but it has been a lovely exercise. For me it felt like casting back to my earliest music writing career, when I wrote musicals and songs for cabaret performers. Again, we were writing songs with a clear beginning, middle and end, and having written a sequence of rather serious operas, from Garrett to When a Man Knows to The Genesis of Frankenstein to The Gardeners, it was lovely to be working on something upbeat, with a positive ending.
You can read more about the work, and sample the libretto, on the Introducing Ademdai page of my website. [https://www.roberthugill.com/introducing-ademdai]
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