Lanternhouse, Cumbernauld
By the time the four young singers on Scottish Opera’s epic small-scale tour from Langholm to Lerwick perform their final show at Dundee Rep on March 22, the latest incarnation of Opera Highlights will be moulded in their image, and will doubtless bowl along with more pace than it did on the opening night. Beyond that, however, this production seems a work-in-progress in other ways.
Perhaps taking her cue from the structure of the company’s recent main-stage single-composer “Collection” concerts (The Strauss Collection is in Glasgow and Edinburgh at the start of March), recently-appointed Head of Music Fiona MacSherry has given this quartet longer sections of operas to get their teeth into. That gives the audience more of an idea of the scores from which some of the famous arias are drawn, and the performers the opportunity to explore and express their characters more fully – up to a point. Baritone Ross Cumming’s pantomime Belcore was a show-stopper in this context, but I suspect he’d become tiresome in a full staging of The Elixir of Love.
A little oddly, for the shape of the whole evening, that sequence of music from Act 1 of the Donizetti, which opened the second half, was the last to be sung in an English translation, as everything had been up to then, and the next two pieces – mezzo Chloe Harris’s Scherza, Infida from Handel’s Ariodante and Cumming again in the programme’s most esoteric inclusion, O vin, dissipe la tristesse from Ambroise Thomas’s Hamlet – might have been from a Highlights tour of old. Rossini songs from Les soirees musicales and an encore quartet arrangement of the meows of the Cats Duet – which eventually explained the proliferation of felines on Kenneth MacLeod’s station platform set – similarly harked back to the style of MacSherry’s predecessor, Derek Clark.
That stage design, together with accompanying sound effects and associated stage business, is key to director Rebecca Meltzer’s production, although irrelevant to MacSherry’s musical selections. The first half’s extended scenes arrive and depart as timetabled trains, a device that works well for the opening of Tchaikovsky’s Onegin, where tenor Robert Forrest has his best scene as Lensky, and the selections from Bizet’s The Pearl Fishers, in which the famous duet for Forrest’s Nadir and Cumming’s Zurga is overshadowed by soprano Kira Kaplan’s fine rendition of Leila’s aria.
Kaplan and Harris’s duet from Hansel and Gretel sits less comfortably with the railway backdrop, although it is well sung, and long enough to suggest Humperdinck’s Wagnerian side. The programme begins with a quartet from Beethoven’s Fidelio, its narrative complexity a tough first call for the audience, even in David Pountney’s translation, but ideal as an introduction to these excellent young voices and the ever-attentive piano playing of musical director Joseph Beesley.
Keith Bruce
Opera Highlights is in Kelso on January 28 and Langholm on January 30 and tours across mainland Scotland and to Shetland and the Outer Hebrides. Details at scottishopera.org.uk