VoxCarnyx

Edinburgh Playhouse / The Lyceum

At the March launch of the 2025 Edinburgh International Festival programme, the Festival’s Head of Music, Nik Zekulin, conceded that the opera content was slighter than in other years.

On paper that may have looked the case, but the reality has felt rather different, and not only through the presence of opera in concert. Whether it inspired or consoled, or simply wore you down, the Festival opener, Tavener’s The Veil of the Temple, was in many ways operatic in scale and style. Its structure, in less epic form, found echoes in both the works presented as staged operas in the Festival programme, even if their music was very different.

With no opera at all in the Festival Theatre, given over to runs of theatre and dance productions, the big event was the use of Edinburgh Playhouse for Gluck’s Orpheus and Eurydice, recreating an Opera Australia production by the director of physical theatre company Circa, Yaron Lifschitz, and his troupe.

Soprano Samantha Clarke, who sang Eurydice and Amor, personified this venture in that her career bounces between Australia and the UK. The Australian performers were joined on stage by the Chorus of Scottish Opera, whose set-builders also made the staging, and Handel specialist Lawrence Cummings conducted the Scottish Chamber Orchestra in the pit.

Clarke was excellent, as were the chorus, but the star vocal turn of the show was counter-tenor Iestyn Davies, an EIF favourite who sang with extraordinary power and also engaged with the physical action, if not to quite the personally perilous degree the superbly-choreographed acrobats displayed.

Far from being in any way gimmicky, they told the story as eloquently as the text and music, from the dramatic trapeze descent of Eurydice to the Underworld to a nicely ambiguous interpretation of Gluck and librettist Calzabigi’s grafting of a happier ending on to the classical tale.

Although none of the forces involved were huge, the production needed the vastness of the Playhouse, and – just as importantly from the EIF’s point of view – attracted an audience that filled all of the seats.

It is more debatable whether Huang Ruo’s Book of Mountains and Seas was any more “opera” than The Veil of the Temple had been. If one of the delights of the Gluck had been the realisation of the rich orchestration, Ruo’s music is sparer, if never quite as austere as Tavener’s often was.

The Chinese-born American resident is a composer of operas – and it will be interesting to see if this work was paving the way for an EIF run of a larger work – but this was a work for chamber choir and puppetry, using four of the ancient Chinese stories from the titular book.

Basil Twist, designer of the National Theatre’s Studio Ghibli adaptation My Neighbour Totoro, was director and his puppetry is of the modern school familiar from The Lion King and War Horse, and in the global perambulations of Little Amal and The Herd. If not so gasp-inducing, his six-strong team, who created galaxies of lantern suns, a bird princess, an archer god and a sprinting giant, supplied the parallel technical expertise to the Circa team in the Gluck.

The dozen singers of Ars Nova Copenhagen were in the Theatre of Voices mould, and directed by counter-tenor from that ensemble, Miles Lallemant. The constant flow between the male and female voices and between honed ensemble and some glorious solo singing was compelling, and Ruo’s music is delightfully hard to pin down, with a global range of influences but a voice entirely his own.

Often the most identifiably “Chinese” element of the sound came from the two percussionists, the only instrumental content and played with quite startling virtuosity. Even there, however, there were Latin American and African elements in what was truly the sound of “world music”.

Keith Bruce