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To the left: a tiled hot tub and mini colonnade. To the right: a show-home bar with felt-tip bright cupboard doors. Artificial grass fills the gaps. Welcome to Studio 3 at Olympus TV, home of Jupiter & Juno – reality television for those convinced The Only Way Is Ancient Rome. Or at least it was, until Juno storms off Love Island, leaving Jupiter without a co-star and the show’s producers with plummeting ratings.
That’s just the first few minutes of Rameau’s Platée in Louisa Muller’s new production for Garsington Opera. Rameau’s overture becomes the show’s title sequence (cue lurid graphics featuring posing deities, airbrushed clouds, gold horses). As played by the English Concert under conductor Paul Agnew, it’s a neat fit – Rameau’s fragmentary phrases crisp and taut, every bit the countdown to curtain-up.
In fact Muller’s conceit works like a fever dream through the first half, making near-miraculous sense of Rameau’s 1745 plot-within-a-plot. The raw materials are not for the faint-hearted. At its core, Jupiter is fed up with Juno’s jealousy, so a demi-god cooks up a plan that Jupiter should pretend to fall for the vain marsh-nymph Platée – a figure so obviously unsuitable (not least because she is cast as a high tenor) that Juno will be taught a lesson.
Turning this into a plan devised by a crew clad in athleisure-wear as the latest love-to-loathe-it reality TV gambit makes it much easier to swallow – for a while. Robert Murray and Henry Waddington are a delight to watch as seedy execs, elegantly dispatching Rameau’s ornamentation and finding a natural home for 18th-century French among the coffee cups and beanbags. The chorus is superb – diction chiselled, phrasing in high-definition – and they move with enviable ease. Yes, their lads’-night-out shrieking over a sheep-race (you had to be there) obliterated the orchestra, but the energy was irresistible.
The problem is the second half. The plot slows. Indeed, delay is the point: Jupiter (a gloriously stentorian sing’n’pose act from Ossian Huskinson) mustn’t actually marry Platée before Juno arrives. And at that point the physical comedy gets desperate: an inexplicable scramble to eat wedding cake; a chorus that keeps falling asleep in sync. Mireille Asselin’s lengthy turn as arch-entertainer La Folie was underpowered. I lost track of which plot-level we were in and gradually stopped caring.
At the centre of it all, mercifully, was a captivating performance by Samuel Boden. His Platée went from an also-ran in a swimwear contest (1950s swim cap, flippers, goggles), to a clown-style makeover for her “wedding”. Yet Boden’s singing was rarely cartoonish. His high register was beautiful – his rare lyrical moments achingly so – even while he flopped and tumbled on stage. The opera’s “happy ending” is heartbreaking – made as cruel here as it could be. Or is that just showbiz?
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“I received plenty of comments saying it was far too soon to ‘go solo’,” Geese frontman Cameron Winter told NME last year while reflecting on how people initially reacted to his decision to branch out on his own. “Most likely because a lot of folks assume that ‘solo albums’ only happen once a band has passed its peak and that they usually feel like uninspired cash grabs.”
Honestly, everyone is trying to earn a living however they can these days, yet no one expected a Geese side project to generate any real financial payoff in 2024. “Just so you know,” he went on, “my solo album is different: because barely anyone knows my band, I am young and comfortable living with my parents and I have the freedom to follow any ideas that interest me.”
Brooklyn indie followers and former NME cover stars Geese were gaining real momentum when their second album ‘3D Country’ mixed cowboy psychedelia with a jazzy, art-punk energy that had already captured the attention of many UK 6 Music dads back in 2023, but who could have predicted what came next? Geese have become one of the most talked-about bands of 2025 and are expected to dominate multiple end-of-year lists with the ambitious and full-range rock of ‘Getting Killed’. Yet the moment that set the stage for this rise was Winter’s Lou Reed-inspired debut solo record ‘Heavy Metal’.
A handful of late-night US television appearances and a spot on Jools Holland acted as a welcoming doorway for the world to see what this 23-year-old can do far beyond what many twice or three times his age are capable of. Now the sold-out Roundhouse audience made up of indie teens, art school regulars, fans who traveled across Europe and seasoned listeners reacts with a collective breath as a slight opening in the stage curtain reveals the silhouette of Winter seated at a piano. First comes a spark of excitement, then a sudden hush.
There is no flashy social media moment, no chatter overriding the music and almost no sea of raised phones. There is a sincerity to how the night unfolds. The Geese singer barely turns toward the audience. “Turn around!” someone calls out from the balcony at one stage. “Is this not enough for you all?” Winter teases back. For some, maybe it was more than enough. At least four people appear to faint around the warm and crowded Roundhouse while the room stands in absolute focus as Winter moves through the dreamlike storytelling of ‘Try As I May’, the emotional swirl of ‘The Rolling Stones’, the bright lift of ‘Love Takes Miles’ and the sermon-like stomp of ‘Nausicaä (Love Will Be Revealed)’. When he reaches the intense and spiritually charged ‘$0’, even the most skeptical hipster might be convinced that “I’m not kidding, God is actually real”. In that moment, it feels as though we all understand.
The entire performance can be summed up in how ‘Drinking Age’ unfolds. It starts softly with a gentle touch on the keys before erupting into a thunderous attack on the Steinway that could echo into next year, followed by a long, open cry aimed toward the sky. Winter somehow manages to blend something minimal with something enormous, something grounded with something cosmic, a delicate approach that hits with staggering force as he reaches toward ideas of existence, heaven, hell and everything surrounding them.
Winter could recite the phone book and still leave a crowd stunned. He carries the spirit of a post-punk Rufus Wainwright you can play alongside The Strokes and Arctic Monkeys, a Gen Z Tom Waits for listeners exhausted by TikTok overload, a new Nick Cave who arrives at exactly the moment he is needed. His voice feels older than his years yet perfectly suited to express the concerns and emotions of his own generation.
We will continue praising Geese endlessly because they deserve it. They are an extraordinary burst of musical creativity that goes far beyond what their lineup would ever imply, and along with Fontaines D.C., they are poised to become one of the decade’s essential bands. Still, tonight offers something quieter and more intimate. Cameron Winter stands completely on his own power, talent and magnetism, proving himself a rising force who can hold an entire room with only his voice, a piano and an entire future waiting for him.
‘Try as I May’
‘Emperor XIII in Shades’
‘The Rolling Stones’
‘Love Takes Miles’
‘Drinking Age’
‘Serious World’
‘Nausicaä (Love Will Be Revealed)’
‘If You Turn Back Now’
‘Vines’
‘Nina + Field of Cops’
‘$0’
‘Take It With You’
‘Cancer of the Skull’
