Powder Her Face: Vocal Full Score

Powder Her Face combines sophisticated musical language with irresistible theatricality, making it accessible and rewarding for singers and audiences alike. The score wears its influences lightly—Weill, Berg, Stravinsky—yet feels entirely contemporary; young performers discover how to navigate modernist harmony while staying dramatically engaged with character. This is a work that takes singers seriously as actors and audiences seriously as listeners.

Powder Her Face moves between glamorous surfaces and darker undercurrents with restless energy. The music glitters with cabaret sophistication and tango swagger, then shifts into something more fractured and anxious, capturing the arc of a society figure's fall from grace. Moments of genuine tenderness emerge alongside satire, creating a score that feels both witty and deeply human.

This work suits advanced opera singers and vocal ensembles prepared for twentieth-century idioms and the specific dramatic and vocal demands of contemporary opera. Singers studying Adès's music, those developing facility with post-tonal harmony, and performers interested in modern British opera will find substantial material here.

• Embrace the cabaret and tango idioms as driving compositional forces. These popular styles are not surface decoration but structural anchors that shape phrasing and rubato throughout the piece.
• Attend carefully to the chamber orchestration: with limited instruments surrounding the voice, every entrance and harmonic shift is exposed. Clarity and intentionality become essential.
• Study the libretto (by Philip Hensher) as deeply as the music. The wit and emotional weight of the text directly inform how lines should be shaped and where dramatic emphasis lands.
• Balance the score's accessibility with its harmonic sophistication. The memorable melodic moments coexist with complex dissonance; both deserve full commitment.

This score works as a centerpiece for an opera or contemporary music festival, or as part of a recital exploring twentieth-century theatrical works. Advanced vocal programs at universities and conservatories can use it to introduce singers to the demands and rewards of modern British opera. A concert performance or staged production both reveal different strengths of Adès's theatrical vision.

• Reading and performing twentieth-century harmony and dissonance
• Balancing lyrical singing with complex harmonic language
• Theatrical characterization through music and text
• Understanding popular idioms (cabaret, tango) within a contemporary compositional context
• Interpreting ambiguous tonality and finding dramatic coherence within modernist structures