Throwing caution to the wild winds: Suddenly there's studio opera everywhere. Nick Kimberley reports on fresh sounds and bite-sized dramas

Will May 1993 go down in history as anything more than the 25th anniversary of May '68? Will it, for instance, be remembered as the month when British opera came of age? Unlikely, you may think, that British opera will ever do any such thing, yet something special is happening to new opera. Andrew Poppy's Baby Doll is playing as part of the National Theatre's 'Springboards' series. Next week, English National Opera (ENO) brings 'the new generation' of opera composers to the Britten Theatre at the Royal College of Music with its 'New Visions, New Voices'. That in turn is followed by ENO's 'Soundbites]' - new 10-minute operas at the Donmar Warehouse. And, as May draws to a close, the Royal Opera House Garden Venture's '6:93' season fills Riverside Studios with half a dozen new short operas.

And it doesn't stop there - in June, Jonathan Harvey's Inquest of Love opens at the London Coliseum, while in July ENO's Almeida Opera season unveils two new works, by Kevin Volans and Julian Grant. If Mozart, Verdi and Wagner don't watch out, there'll be no room for them in the opera house.

That won't happen, of course, and it is not the primary intention of these initiatives to provide a new repertoire. But nor are they training exercises to get the composer limbered up for the Big One. As Michael Finnissy, the Garden Venture's composer consultant, insists: 'This is not a poor cousin to 'real' opera: it is real opera, on a small scale. I don't think it's a good idea to promote anything with a view to immortality. History will decide. Trying to get masterpieces out of composers by design is barking up the wrong tree, and I'm concerned to promote the idea that an evening's entertainment of music plus words need not always involve casts of thousands and herds of elephants. It can take place with two people and a piano - after all, people go to see plays with only two actors.'

There will be no elephants for 'New Visions, New Voices', a project of the Baylis Programme, ENO's outreach department. The project emerged from a competition for new opera written by composers under the age of 30. The response was 103 operas from four continents, which, suggests co-director David Sulkin, 'gave us the idea that a lot of people were probably writing operas that never came out from behind closed doors. Professional musicians, professional composers are caught up in the web of professionalism, they know there's a lot at stake when they present a new work. Here, people have written in a wild, fresh way, throwing caution to the winds. The entries came in every conceivable form: little poetry books, large scores on wallpaper, tapes which said, 'You'll screech when you hear the sound quality but I can't do any better - please listen]' Some sketchy ideas, some full scores, some simple, some complex. These works don't know about what we think of as contemporary music, they don't have to pay respect to anything and that's great.'

The first batch of entries was whittled down to eight, then a final four; they range from Melissa's Maelstrom, written by 16-year-old twins Rosabella and Dina Gregory, to Still, a collaboration between 26-year-old composer Richard Chew (a Royal College of Music graduate) and 24-year-old librettist James Yarker, who studied theatre at Lancaster University. Each work has gone through a development process at the Royal College before reaching the stage and, for Sulkin, that is crucial: 'The scores were inevitably late, the singers hadn't properly learnt the music before we started rehearsing, so we were saying, 'We should change this, it doesn't quite work, what can we ask the composer to do?' - and there isn't enough of that. The larger the scale of the work, the more hermetic they are before they reach the stage. That's what's good about working in a small way: we had to set challenges, and it's good to do that. We wanted to give the tools of opera to people who didn't have any preconceptions about them.'

Richard Chew, who has worked in opera as a singer, has a sense of operatic proprieties, but is not constrained by them: 'I had worked with my librettist James Yarker before - we did a show in Birmingham called Memoirs of an Amnesiac, based on the life of Erik Satie. James's training is in experimental theatre, devising works from scratch, and that experience meant that at the end of the development process we had a clear idea of what the opera should be. At the beginning of the development I had about 12 minutes of music. The rest we improvised with the performers, and then I took that away to work on. I'm still not sure how the work will flow - it's up to the performers to make it happen. Even if the experiment doesn't work, that doesn't negate the process.'

No doubt there will be many who say that such studio experiments don't work in public, but only by continuing the process can successful works be generated. As Henrietta Bredin, administrator of ENO's Contemporary Opera Studio, has discovered: 'A lot of the composers who want to write opera, don't go to the opera, which is a very peculiar thing. There's a lack of knowledge of theatrical reality, how to make things work on stage - not that 'Soundbites]' is a philanthropic project, commissioning people just to give them a chance. We commission people who are completely ready to write a professional, fully realised piece. The point is not to throw money at it. For a start we haven't got it, and the exercise is to work within strict limits. In some ways that brings out the best.'

What money there is often comes with strings attached, and Michael Finnissy, for one, is not sure those strings are a good thing: 'Funding is difficult to obtain without some kind of educational outreach programme, and the Garden Venture has to function as an educational idea for at least 50 per cent of its time, manacled by that to doing things that are not in the last analysis going to bear much more fruit. Education is a stick to beat opera companies with, it's become cynical and exploitative, and it doesn't mean that you get quality work. Quite the reverse. Opera is theatre, it's very different from the idea of music as abstract perfection, it's for composers who are interested in getting their hands dirty, so you encourage them to go to the theatre, to the cinema, to think about their own lives.'

One composer who has certainly been to the cinema is Andrew Poppy, whose opera Baby Doll derives from Tennessee Williams' screenplay for the Elia Kazan film. It's surprising that more composers haven't made the cinema their operatic starting point, but for Poppy it was an obvious move: 'Film, the 20th-century art form, is one distillation of language, image, sound and music; but opera has a possibility that film doesn't have: music can structure the drama, rather than remaining outside it. Opera is much more epic and formal - and if you want a culture that has strong music theatre, you need time, and you need it to be happening all the time.'

Perhaps that culture is now beginning to emerge. Errollyn Wallen, whose Four Figures with Harlequin is part of '6:93' at Riverside Studios, says: 'I'm hungry to do more music theatre pieces - you stretch yourself in new ways. But I thought I should work with somebody who knew about stagecraft, so right from the beginning I discussed it with the director Lucy Bailey, and the designer Angela Davies was also involved quite early on, so that we had the visual idea to work with. What happens a lot of the time is that the librettist hands over the libretto, the composer then works on that in isolation, then hands it over to the director, who passes it on to the designer: there's no room for dynamic changes.'

It's hard to believe that, if nothing else grows from these operatic buds of May '93, there won't be some process of dynamic change which makes itself felt in the future of opera. Then all we need to do is find the audiences - or is that another story?

'Baby Doll', Cottesloe Theatre, 8, 10, 13, 15 May, 8pm; 'New Visions, New Voices', Britten Theatre, 10, 11, 13, 14 May, 7pm; 'Soundbites]' Donmar Warehouse, 18-19 May, 7pm; '6:93', Riverside Studios, 28 May to 6 June

(Photograph omitted)