Sawer - Skin Deep

David Sawer’s Skin Deep takes us on a journey of physical perfection, to a place where beauty is created: Dr Needlemeier’s Alpine Clinic – Putting right what nature got wrong. We meet his family, patients and even the odd Hollywood celebrity in a tale that charts desire, spans continents and, ultimately, asks the question: What is the real price of perfection?

The satirical libretto is by multiple-British Comedy Award winner Armando Iannucci.

The world première of Skin Deep was given by Opera North in Leeds, and was followed by performances in Copenhagen and Bregenz.

The Times wrote of Sawer’s score: “He commands a light touch, a terse rapidity, a witty scherzando manner that is Stravinskyan in its biting clarity, but aids him in emulating those masters of comic texture Rossini and Offenbach, whom he cites as models for Skin Deep.

Sawer uses tonality in a completely fresh way, while drawing freely on more acerbic, modernist sounds native to him. An atonal operetta would be a strange beast indeed, but Sawer has found a plausible stylistic compromise. … There is a seductiveness, a glamour, to some passages; others are hard-hitting; and the general spareness of the approach (its resemblance to minimalism is skin deep) proves highly effective.”