In the mixed bag that is Tête à Tête, you always get at least one well-intentioned flop. they heavily vanish is a prime example. The title is an excerpt from one of Shakespeare’s own stage directions: an elegant bit of magpie borrowing. The piece is intended as “a sustained homage to the words of The Tempest”: a perfectly valid idea. And yet, as the piece continued with clashing volumes and unsympathetic pacing, the relationship between speech and song remained uneven and conflicted. The more rambling it became, the more pretentious it felt.

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