VoxCarnyx

Glasgow Royal Concert Hall

It’s true what Scottish Opera’s music director Stuart Stratford said in his introduction to The French Collection: that the French really know how to do passion with nuance. He was conducting the Orchestra of Scottish Opera and a superbly-matched solo vocal quartet in a programme of operatic excerpts representative of the 19th century French lyric tradition that more than proved his point.

It was, first and foremost, a showcase event for the orchestra, iridescent and often lusty scores giving them plenty to get their teeth into. On their own, in the boisterous Fête Polonaise from Chabrier’s Le roi malgré lui that set the ball rolling, they unleashed a feisty exuberance in this intoxicating soup of punchy fanfares, rhythmic eccentricities and schmaltzy dance. Complementing that as a second half opener, the exotically wild Bacchanale from Saint-Saëns’ Samson et Dalila, with its in-vogue orientalism, oozed sensual enchantment. 

But it was with the singers, and two substantial Goethe-inspired chunks of Massenet and Gounod, that this concert really took flight. Scots mezzo-soprano Catriona Morison set the ball rolling as Charlotte in part of Act III from Massenet’s Werther, a character tortured by doubt, Morison’s rich mezzo penetrating the very heart of her dilemma in tandem with tenor Alok Kumar’s impassioned Werther. Soprano Alexandra Lowe allowed her sparkling vocal acrobatics as Sophie (Charlotte’s sister) to introduce a lighter hue.

The mainstay of the second half was from another Act III, this time Gounod’s Faust, in which Faust (Kumar) makes advances on Marguerite (Lowe) on the advice of Méphistophélès. The latter was sung by Roland Wood, fresh from the title role in Scottish Opera’s recent hit production of Jonathan Dove’s Marx in London!, and a last-minute stand-in for advertised bass Callum Thorpe. 

Kumar’s and Lowe’s big opening arias cemented the sexual tension from the outset, ardent and seductive, sumptuously enhanced by Stratford’s sharpening and shading of the orchestral colours and the music’s rhythmic elasticity. Wood may have been reading from a score (understandably), but his portrayal, offsetting mischief with menace, captured the essence of his character. And Morison was there again (as she will be later this week with the RSNO), revealing a wittier dimension to her persuasive stage armoury as the scheming Marthe.

Adding further to the programme’s bipartite symmetry, the two male soloists signed off the first half with Bizet’s well-worn duet from Les pêcheurs de perles, while the female twosome added the unscheduled Flower Duet from Delibes’ Lakmé as a second half encore. All in all, a perfectly balanced programme all the more special for the impressive calibre of its delivery.

Ken Walton