Scottish Opera: Opera Highlights
Scottish Opera: Opera Highlights
Gartmore Village Hall
With its community-run pub, The Black Bull, next door, Gartmore Village Hall in the Trossachs has the atmosphere of some of the further-flung venues that Scottish Opera’s small scale touring operation reaches, like the early November dates in Lochinver and Glenuig on this current outing.
It beggars belief that Kenneth MacLeod’s late-20th century office set, complete with watercooler and Mac Classic computers, fits into the small van that has traditionally been used for these excursions, and its quality of build and attention to detail speaks of the ambition of this iteration of the project once known as Opera-Go-Round.
No longer a sequence of party pieces with a few rarities to add spice, Opera Highlights has become a directed show (Emma Doherty this time out) that links extended excerpts from three operas and all of a fourth (Barber’s A Hand of Bridge) in an invented scenario – a farewell bash in the retro-office during which all manner of interpersonal relationships come to light.
It’s fun – if never quite funny enough as yet – but not the main point of the exercise, which is to give four young singers and a hard-working repetiteur at the piano (Meghan Rhoades, one of three of the current cohort of Scottish Opera Emerging Artists involved) the opportunity to strut their stuff, and to fly the national company’s flag outside of Scotland’s big cities.
The mission of taking proper singing to Crail and Nairn and Castle Douglas and Castlebay is admirably accomplished. Baritone James Geidt opens proceedings as Tonio from Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci and later takes the role of Silvio, while tenor Luvo Maranti plays cuckolded Canio and gets the big aria that closes the first half.
Soprano Ceferina Penny, making her company debut, comes storming out the blocks as Gounod’s Juliette – and the departing colleague in the workplace scenario, which is established with Maranti as Romeo and mezzo Chloe Harris doubling as his page Stephano and her nurse, Gertrude.
As everything is sung in good English translations (Bill Bankes-Jones, Amanda Holden and David Pountney among the wordsmiths), the office setting is believably maintained, with the Barber an interlude at the party that is inventively echoed in the sequence of selections from Strauss’s Die Fledermaus that brings the whole show to a suitably champagne-fuelled climax.
The quartet really comes into its own as a group then, and the most accomplished performer, from the moment she swaps her trainers for work shoes under the office computer-desk at the start to her drink-fuelled Chacun a son gout, is Harris. She also has the best of the evening’s outliers in the Letter scene from Massenet’s Werther, duetting with Penny, and an aria from Handel’s Alcina.
Keith Bruce
Picture by Sally Jubb
Full tour details scottishopera.org.uk