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Review: Hansel and Gretel

7 February 2012 By Leave a Comment

This review is also published (with some pictures) at Opera Britannia

Hansel & Gretel – Engelbert Humperdinck
Rating: ★★★½☆
Theatre Royal, Glasgow – 4 February 2012, Scottish Opera

Just a dozen or so years before Engelbert Humperdinck wrote his most famous opera, the world was tasting saccharine for the first time. The great danger with Hansel and Gretel is that it will taste much the same. Bill Bankes-Jones’s production of Hansel and Gretel for Scottish Opera managed to find enough that is dark and sinister to ensure that we were not overwhelmed by sweetness but still managed to produce an evening where the sheer beauty of the music leads the production from beginning to end. [Read more...]

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Review: Betrothal in a Monastery

24 January 2012 By Leave a Comment

Scottish Opera and the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland 20 January 2012

Rating: ★★½☆☆

Prokofiev’s Betrothal in a Monastery is seldom staged in this country. This production by Scottish Opera in collaboration with the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland worked reasonably well as a showcase for the singing talents of those on stage. However, no persuasive case was made for the piece itself and the staging was sloppy and careless from the outset.

One of the oddest things about this opera is its title. Though several couples do indeed end up wedding one another in a monastery, the monastery itself plays no part in the plot other than as a setting for a bunch of monks to carouse and throw pillows at one another. The actual plot itself is merely a case of one or two mistaken romantic identities.

The curious thing about this opera is how busy it feels. No one dies, no one falls in love, no one cross-dresses and despite the presence of considerable numbers of people on stage in religious orders, no-one gets their head chopped off. [Read more...]

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Opera Review – Orpheus in the Underworld

16 September 2011 By Leave a Comment

Scottish Opera – 10 September 2011

As published on Opera Britannia

Rating: ★★★★☆

Scottish Opera is at the start of taking a bawdy romp around Scotland and Northern Ireland with an inventive, witty and utterly filthy Orpheus in the Underworld. This is an exemplary touring show – satirical, relevant, well sung and with plenty of naughtiness to torment Tain, disgust Dumfries or provoke outrage in Armagh. That it very precisely sets out to subvert petty morality with its portrayal of the hypocrisies of Public Opinion will make achieving such outrage all the sweeter. [Read more...]

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Rigoletto Review – Scottish Opera

20 May 2011 By Leave a Comment

Rating: ★★★★☆

Here’s the review that I wrote for Opera Britannia of Scottish Opera’s current Rigoletto:

From the moment the curtain went up on this stylish and beautifully sung Rigoletto, it was clear that this was going to be a confident production. We saw a dark, blank stage with only a simple door, drawn slightly carelessly as though with chalk. It was but the first of many bold visual images which punctuated an assured and very satisfying musical achievement.

This single door soon gave way to a barrier wall, upon which red curtaining had been painted, which consisted of a further series of doors, through which we could glimpse a ball in progress. What was not immediately apparent was that when we first caught sight of the malevolent chorus of courtiers, they were not in fact dancing with real women at all but with a series of mannequins. These eerie plastic figures were to recur throughout the evening in what was to prove a strong and well thought through staging. The twenty-six strong chorus themselves, when not larking about with mannequins, were in good heart and good voice throughout.

The first to shine on stage was Edgaras Montvidas whose Duke of Mantua was a force to be reckoned with. This duke was a cocky soul, strutting his stuff whenever he was on stage. Montvidas has a voice which perfectly matched the bravado which he brought to his part. This was a Duke who was arrogant, brash, conceited and vain but it was clear too that he had a great deal on offer vocally to be conceited about. His Parmi veder le lagrime in the second act seemed particularly effortless and whilst it is difficult to bring anything new to La donna è mobile, Montvidas gave an assured rendition all the same.

The Duke’s jester, Rigoletto was played by Eddie Wade.  Here was a brilliant performance. Wade’s unfortunate hunchback [Read more...]

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Opera Review – Intermezzo

7 April 2011 By Leave a Comment

[This review was recently published at the Opera Britannia website and can be seen there with pictures from the show].

Strauss’s Intermezzo is seldom performed and consequently not particularly widely known. Scottish Opera’s new production (directed by Wolfgang Quetes) is an attempt to rescue the reputation of a difficult and troubling work which, though it has wonderful music throughout, never quite allows us to escape a suspicion that what we are watching is a rather vicious public shaming by the composer of his wife.

In a world in which we are used to watching the inner turmoil of dysfunctional relationships played out on the small screen, it is surprising how shocking it remains for them to be performed before our eyes on the opera stage.

The plot, such as it is, is this. A famous composer (obviously supposed to be Strauss himself) is in a stormy marriage with an untrusting, yet not entirely faithful wife (obviously supposed to be Pauline, Strauss’s wife). Though she has a dalliance with a young student baron who tries his hardest to tap her for money, she reacts hysterically when she wrongly suspects her husband of playing fast and loose with women in Vienna. In the end she discovers that the composer’s virtue is intact and domestic bliss is restored. The opera’s origins came about some 20 years after the real life events in the Strauss household which are described therein. So hot to handle was it at the time that several librettists turned the job down and in the end Strauss was compelled to set his own text. [Read more...]

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Review – Orlando, Scottish Opera

12 March 2011 By Leave a Comment

Aha, my review of Orlando has now gone up at the Opera Britannia website. Rather late in the day, but I gather they have recruited someone new to get the reviews up much quicker in the future.

Here is what I said:

Rating: ★★★☆☆

Scottish Opera – Theatre Royal, Glasgow, 14 February 2011

Scottish Opera’s Orlando is a vehicle for some fine virtuoso singing but the evening never amounts to anything greater than the sum of its parts. Indeed, though some of those parts are a delight, others fall short of expectations leading to something of a mixed bag.
[Read more...]

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The Adventures of Mr Brouček

11 April 2010 By Leave a Comment

The following review also appears on Opera-Britannia.com
Rating: ★★★★☆
It is not difficult to see why performances of The Adventures of Mr Brouček are something of a rarity. The eponymous Brouček is whisked through time, space and circumstance in an opera whose score is at once challenging and beguiling. Scottish Opera’s collaboration with Opera North makes the best possible case for the inclusion of the piece in the modern canon yet this formidable production still leaves one unsurprised that this is only the second time the opera has been seen in Scotland. Indeed, it has been a long time since it was last seen, in an Edinburgh Festival performance in 1970, the premiere of the work in the UK.

Structurally, The Adventures of Mr Brouček barely hang together. In the first half, the consequences of Brouček’s boozing are a trip to the moon and a series of encounters with characters whom he remembers from his bar. In the second, his drinking takes him back in time to 1420 and the Hussite rising in Prague. Again, the characters of Brouček’s alcohol induced fantasy are based on those who inhabit his local. Though he (and we) recognise them, they deny all knowledge of him. Whether on the moon or fifteenth century Prague, Brouček is an outsider, a loner and a stranger.

It is perhaps this sense of alienation that has led John Fulljames to set the bar scenes not in the early twentieth century but in 1968. That clever choice of date is a clear attempt to link the two disparate stories together. The setting takes us to a time just before the moon landings and just at the time of the Russian intervention in what was then Czechoslovakia. The lunar fantasy of Act I can only make what sense it does, if it takes place before anyone on earth had the images of the moon landings fixed for good in the imagination. Meanwhile, we were encouraged to see the Hussite rebellion of Act II within the context of the ongoing struggle of the Czech nation which reached such a defining point in 1968.

All these changes in scene give much for a creative team to work on. Particularly striking throughout the evening was the use of both the projected video work of Finn Ross and the accomplished and striking lighting design of Lucy Carter. The video located the work in the 1960s and was by turn whimsical and unexpectedly beautiful. [Read more...]

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The Secret Marriage – Scottish Opera

1 November 2008 By Leave a Comment

Hands up how many people know the Secret Marriage and can whistle some of the tunes.

I thought so; only those who have been working on it with Scottish Opera recently. Yet the strange thing is, as one sits there in the dress circle tapping one’s smile in time with the music, one has the feeling that although the work is not widely known, the tunes are already somehow in your head.

Mr Cimarosa’s work seems at one and the same time familiar and unfamiliar. Does this describe a work which is predicatable? Well, perhaps so. Yet not particularly any the less enjoyable for that.

Scottish Opera’s programming is sometimes surprising. Did they consciously want us to compare this work to the Two Widows of several weeks ago? The music last night was very different, but the plot, such as it was seemed oddly familiar. Once again we were back in a well designed drawing room with a story that hung only by the flimsy cotton thread of someone changing their mind about whom they would love. Having said that, the Secret Marriage carried its wit on its voluminous sleeves much more comfortably than Mr Smetana’s piece so recently did.

Amongst other good singing, Rebecca Bottone’s Carolina stood out as being particuarly good. The clarity of both her words and her cheek shone out from the stage. It was not difficult to see what Paolino saw in her - as though Kylie Minogue had been dressed up in fifties A-line and dipped in a sweet buffa coating. In the end though, this was a strictly ensemble piece and no-one let the side down.

A sparking libretto, a clever set and a jolly, if light, score made this another delightful evening out. Scottish Opera know how to please us. Do they know how to challenge us? Do they know how to surprise us?

Time will tell.

Rating: ★★★★☆

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The Two Widows – Scottish Opera

15 October 2008 By Leave a Comment

What more could one want at the end of a long day than gin and two widows?

Scottish Opera’s Two Widows is a delightful concoction. Sometimes it is a joy to go for an evening out and know that one will not be sent out into the darkness with a TB-related cough rattling in one’s ears or having to face sleep having just witnessed the massacre of nuns. No, The Two Widows is a simple tale of requited love accompanied by some lovely music. More or less plot free, young man spies young widow and puts himself in her way until eventually she capitulates and changes her mind about him. The naughty coniving of her cousin, the other widow is the only artiface on which the tale turns.

Musically it was well sung and well played. The forty or so faux-peasants which made up the chorus brought jollity and fun into the equation when the leads were charmingly bewailing unrequited love or pining for things that could not be.

Does unrequited love often turn around so? Not in my experience. However, the young man in question kept on through the forest of love until the lovely doe that he had espied became his true love forever.

Yet this was not mere confection. A clever stage design allowed for some interesting business over mirror images and reflections. This device kept us entertained and interested through one or two of the more unlikely arias (Mumlal’s silly growling song, for example), but did more than this also. The audience were invited to consider whether other people’s perceptions of themselves are true to their own inner conviction and narrative.

Does my reflection match my inner conviction? Does love inevitably win out in the end?

Better librettos have been written by people who have been less certain than Emanuel Zngel seems to have been about both those questions. However, Smetana made silk out of rough material and Scottish Opera sported that silk with some panache.

Well worth seeing.

Rating: ★★★★☆

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