VoxCarnyx

Royal Conservatoire of Scotland

Naturalism has ruled the roost on Scotland’s opera stages for so many years now that it is bracingly refreshing to see a production quite as committed to the director’s concept as this rare Haydn revival featuring the current masters cohort at the Alexander Gibson Opera School.

A triumph at the Esterhazy court in 1773, L’infedelta delusa (Infidelity Outwitted) then disappeared for the best part of a couple of centuries, and – like the rest of Haydn’s opera output for his patron – finds few champions yet.

Rather than recreate the Tuscan countryside which is the composer and librettist Marco Coltellini’s setting, Jamie Manton sets this knockabout tale of love thwarted and restored in a contemporary storage unit with a cast of long-unloved, and uncostumed, dolls. There are nods to both Toy Story and the recent Barbie movie, but his re-imagining goes its own way, especially in Act 2 when our crusading heroine Vespina assumes various disguises to further the (paper-thin) plot. These take the form of outsized doll’s heads, usually worn instead by her brother Nanni in Manton’s staging, leaving soprano Anna Marmion unencumbered to sing.

She and Qi Lui, as Sandrina, the beauty around whom the matrimonial machinations revolve, were the vocal stars of the cast: two contrasting soprano voices perfectly cast for their different roles, and both more comfortably committed to the marionette-like movement vocabulary required. As well as having to master a long recitative and aria score in Italian, with some delicious complex ensembles, Manton’s concept demands a huge amount of activity from his company of five, unattractively garbed and with masses of props. This production is the sort of challenging experience a conservatoire should be throwing at its post-graduate students.

The men, tenors Aidan Thomas Phillips as Sandrina’s father Filippo and Haydn Cullen as his chosen son-in-law Nencio, and bass Fraser Robinson as Nanni, seemed vocally less confident, Phillips’ early command of the recitatives failing later, suggesting he wasn’t fully fit, and both Cullen and Robinson not as secure at the lower end of the range they were required to sing.

That the chaps were also less adept choreographically was less of a problem. In this tale their characters are exposed as hapless, prideful and cocksure, and the women win the day. They have much of the best music too, and Qi Lui’s delivery of Sandrina’s Act 2 aria was particularly memorable, while Marmion’s “old lady” voice was as musically precise as her more passionate singing as the determined Vespina.

Just as crucial, though, was the contribution from the pit orchestra under the baton of the Conservatoire’s current Leverhulme Conducting Fellow, Riley Court-Wood. Whether or not any period instruments were deployed, the musicians contrived a very spritely period sound. The opera was composed around the same time as the japery of Haydn’s “Farewell” Symphony and there is a false ending to one of the vocal quintets that prefigures the later “Surprise” Symphony. It is a score of high-quality mid-life Haydn that is well-worth this revival on its own.

The composer subtitled L’infedelta delusa as a “Burletta per musica”, and – although some of the visual references might cause him confusion – it is reasonable to suggest that he may well have approved of the manic buffoonery of this revival.

Keith Bruce

Further performances January 29 and 31

Picture of Anna Marmion as Vespina by Hope Holmes