VoxCarnyx

St Mary’s, Haddington

Perfect though the use of Haddington’s Corn Exchange proved for Britten’s Albert Herring at last year’s Lammermuir Festival, Scottish Opera’s return to St Mary’s for its 2025 contribution was both necessary and welcome.

Primarily that was for musical reasons, and the superb playing of the full Orchestra of Scottish Opera for Maurice Ravel’s L’heure espagnole and William Walton’s The Bear, under the energetic baton of Alexandra Cravero. The Ravel, of course, is packed with delightful orchestral detail. The story of the convoluted love-life of Concepcion, the fickle wife of clockmaker Torquemada, had every possible expression of the passage of time, with onstage metronome, ticking percussion and chiming bells most obvious.

The score of The Bear proved no less fascinating, and as it includes knowing nods to other composers, including Debussy and Britten, it is far from unlikely that Walton had the early work in mind as well. This is the playful Walton of Façade rather than the composer of the more problematic Troilus and Cressida.

In putting the two works together, the company was also making use of its resident company of Emerging Artists, and regular soloist Jamie MacDougall – and had the added impetus of producing a staging that will work in Glasgow’s Theatre Royal and Edinburgh Festival Theatre during the autumn season.

That will mean an expanded scenic design, but it was clear that the essential elements are already in place in Kenneth Macleod’s work for Jacopo Spirei’s production.

It paid to pay close attention to the supertitles in L’heure espagnole, which faithfully rendered the jokes being delivered in French by the cast. Lea Shaw’s knowing performance as Concepcion had the lion’s share of these and she played them to the hilt, matched by Edward Jowle’s broad portrayal of lustful banker Don Inigo.

South African tenor Luvo Maranti probably got more laughs though, for the poetic attempts by his character, Gonzalve, to play up the role of romantic lover, while baritone Daniel Barrett caught just the right tone for the naïve Ramiro, in a production that was not really about subtlety at all.

Making good use of the whole performance space in a way that was new to Scottish Opera’s work in the venue, there was a lot going on, but then that is exactly what farce is all about.

The premise of The Bear might be just as absurd – what purpose can a widow have in trying to punish her faithless husband by refusing any human interaction herself after his death? – but its source in a short story of Chekhov means we are in a very different world.

Barrett, making his Scottish Opera debut as a new recruit to the team of Emerging Artists, was superb as the titular Bear, a boorish creditor of the dead man who finds himself falling for the widow. Chloe Harris, as bereaved Yelena Ivanovna Popova, also gave a nicely-measured performance, and a definitive reading of the evening’s hit tune – the mezzo party-piece, I Was A Constant, Faithful Wife.

Keith Bruce

Repeated at Glasgow’s Theatre Royal, October 18 and 22 and Edinburgh Festival Theatre, November 15.

Picture of Daniel Barrett and Chloe Harris in The Bear by Sally Jubb