CD Review | Monica Pearce: December, Essential Opera

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Monica Pearce: December

Maureen Batt, Erin Bardua & Danielle Buonaiuto, sopranos; Tara Scott, conductor

Leaf Music, 2025

December is a very short (20-minute) opera by Monica Pearce scored for three sopranos and string quartet. It first saw the light of day as a streamed video by Essential Opera in December 2020. Now the soundtrack from that video has been remixed as an audio EP (digital download and streaming), and released on Leaf Music.

It’s the story of two women in love. Julia (Erin Bardua) is taking her lover Natasha (Danielle Buonaiuto) home for the holidays to meet her family for the first time. It’s set up as an extended phone call between the two as Julia packs and then makes her way through the airport, dealing with various interruptions to call airline customer service and navigate security along the way. The various agents involved are all sung by Maureen Batt.

It’s quite touching, and Batt’s characters add a touch of dark humour. The best scene features Top Priority Air’s “customer service.” It’s the dreaded saga of endless holds, infinite “for this, press x” lists and general indifference and lack of helpfulness. Batt gets this just right, singing with a tone indicative of utter lack of interest.

Julia finally makes it through the airport but is forced to unwrap her Christmas presents at security. One of them is an engagement ring. All of this comes over well on CD, in part because the delivery of text is extremely clear. Inevitably though, some of the visual humour of the video is a bit lost.

Pearce’s music is varied and interesting. In the early scenes it’s quite minimalist with lots of pizzicato, but it becomes more lyrical as the piece progresses. The text is set clearly which helps greatly with comprehension, especially with an all-soprano cast. The piece is musically playful as one might expect, given the subject matter, and the full sonic potential of the string instruments are used effectively.

The recording quality is clear, detailed and very solid, at least in the 48kHz/24bit version I listened to.

December is really quite fun, as well as being a reminder of that dark time when YouTube or equivalents were our only source of new opera!