MAN AND BOY: DADA
An Opera in two acts composed by Michael Nyman
Libretto: Michael Hastings
The generously packaged, slip cased 2-CD set contains a four-colour 44-page booklet with complete libretto.

Man and Boy: Dada is the first in a triptych of chamber operas written by Nyman with librettist Michael Hastings. It tells the story of the unlikely friendships between the ageing Dadaist artist Kurt Schwitters, who is exiled in war-torn London; a 12-year-old boy called Michael, who shares the artist's obsession with collecting London Transport bus tickets; and Michael's mother, widowed by the war. The recording reunites the cast from the UK premiere performance at the Almeida Theatre in July 2004 – tenor John Graham Hall as Schwitters, William Sheldon as the boy, and soprano Vivian Tierney as the boy's mother. Paul McGrath conducts the Michael Nyman Band.

Nyman's identification with the storyline runs deep, for as a child growing up in South Chingford in the 1950s, he hoarded bus tickets as part of a collecting mania that also included cigarette cards, matchbox labels, coins and train numbers. In 2001, Hastings approached Nyman to suggest collaborating on a radio play about a post-war London boy who collected bus tickets. Nyman naturally recognised himself in the main character. But he also had an extra element to contribute to the story line. He had recently returned from Dusseldorf where he saw a Schwitters exhibition and discovered the artist's recurring use of bus tickets in his collages. The fusion of the two characters' mutual fixation leads to a friendship which drives the opera's plot which also reveals the terrible loss suffered by Schwitters as he was forced by the Nazis to leave Germany.

The Almeida production of Man and Boy: Dada was greeted with critical acclaim. "Touching and witty, naïve and profound, Man and Boy: Dada is a journey, well worth taking," said Nick Kimberley in The Evening Standard. Writing in the Financial Times, David Murray called it a "genuine success," and Ivan Hewett in The Daily Telegraph found it a "a subtle and touching piece of music-theatre."

Music by Michael Nyman
Libretto by Michael Hastings