Chamber operas with a tiny orchestra?

[Guido]

My friend wants to do an opera in a place where there is almost no pit... are there operas for very very few players?

Savitri and Curlew River have both been done in the last year at Cambridge, so not them. Maybe just Dido and Aeneas with single/double strings...

[Scarpia]

Stravinsky, Histoire du soldat, for septet.   Britten wrote a couple of chamber operas, the Rape of Lucrecia and another one.

[knight66]

Walton: The Bear, but there are only two parts in it. Recently a friend of mine played piano as the only instrument to accompany La Traviata, heroic in a way, but obviously not as envisaged.

Menotti has a two hander called, 'The Telephone', modest accompiment. Under 20 instruments are needed for 'The Turn of the Screw' and they do not all play at once, EG Piano and Celesta.

Mike

[Maciek]

One of my favorites, Nyman's The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, has an ensemble consisting of 7 instruments: harp, piano, 2 violins, viola, and 2 cellos (http://www.chesternovello.com/default.aspx?TabId=2432&State_3041=2&workId_3041=11516).

[Superhorn]

   The other Britten operas scored for small ensemble are" The Turn of the Screw",based on the famous Henry James ghost story,
and "Albert Herring."
   A recent opera which also uses a small ensemble is "Powder Her Face" by the versatile English composer,pianist and conductor Thomas Ades, which can be heard on an EMI recording conducted by the composer. This is about the scandalous Duchess of Argyle,a sort of female Don Juan.

[Luke]

Maxwell Davies' The Lighthouse, with its very small orchestra, is one of the great operas of this genre - it's fabulously exciting and musically superb, with some of PMD's most effective and provocative pastiches thrown in the mix too.

[petrarch]

There's also Nono's Prometeo, opera without action for ensemble, choir and live electronics.

[Guido]

Cheers for the suggestions guys - The Maxwell Davies and Nyman sound very promising. Ades' Powder her face contains decent music, but it's such a nasty piece - something horrible about the whole thing...