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.
Ancient Chinese myths inspire Huang Ruo’s opera, confronting humanity’s complex relationship with nature.
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”.
Once pipped for pop stardom, Iestyn Davies opted instead for success as a classical “yodeller”. The award-winning countertenor stars with Australian circus ensemble Circa in Gluck’s Orpheus and Eurydice. KEN WALTON reports.
It’s 30 years since the blistering Summer of Britpop, when Blur and Oasis led a hungry pack battling for pole position in the charts. Iestyn Davies was 15 that year, a musically-gifted pupil at the specialist Wells Cathedral School. He and three school pals – collectively the wannabe Britpop band Cage – were faced with a tempting offer to sign up for a record deal they were assured could easily lead to chart-topping success.
“Yes, the pop world lost out,” says the now 45-year-old Davies, who eschewed pop fame to become one of the world’s leading classical countertenors. He’s currently in Scotland to sing the male title role in director Yaron Lifschitz’s circus-led production of Gluck’s Orpheus and Eurydice at the Edinburgh International Festival.
“We were huge fans of Blur then and all the other bands with one-syllable names, and were actually about to be victims of what would become a kind of Britain’s Got Talent thing, where the A&R people wanted to manufacture something cool rather than just let us do our own thing.
“It was a big deal,” Davies recalls. “Atlantic Records, a branch of Sony, came to our school, we got selected, and against thousands of other bands got down to the last two. They said we’re really interested in you guys because you’re all really good musicians. We played songs to the A&R guy in our studio at school and he said with the right financial backing we could go to number one. Sure, we’d have made lots of money, but in the end it wasn’t for us.” In time, the constituent members of Cage went their separate ways to pursue careers in classical music.
For York-born Davies, there was an undeniable logic to his choice. By the age of eight, he’d experienced the hothouse choir school environment of the Oxbridge chapel, at St John’s College, Cambridge. It was a baptism of fire, he recalls, “a bit like being taught to swim. You’re thrown in at this early age to perform daily in this thing called choral evensong, initially imitating the boy next to you to pick things up. But the musicality I picked up there was invaluable: the ability to learn music quickly, sight read, be a good team player, be a professional musician. It’s why I’m doing what I do now.”
It stood him in good stead when, on leaving secondary school, he took up a choral scholarship at Cambridge, studying archeology and anthropology, before honing his singing technique – he once compared the rarefied countertenor voice to “yodelling” – at the Royal Academy of Music. Prestigious awards followed in a career that has combined leading opera appearances (the New York Met and Covent Garden included) to acclaimed worldwide concert performances and prize-winning recordings.
He’s no stranger, either, to the Edinburgh International Festival, though one previous visit lingers painfully in his memory. “I woke up the morning of a Queen’s Hall concert with absolutely no voice, nothing,” he recalls. He struggled in to the pre-concert run through, managing to squeeze out a sound. “The old chorister mentality hit in: if you can still sing a bit you’re doing it.” A friend who’d attended the same programme a few weeks earlier, and having heard the Edinburgh live broadcast, called him up to say it was even better than the York performance. “It just goes to show, you can never second guess the audience!”
Circa in Gluck’s Orpheus and Eurydice (Image: West Beach Studio)
Did Davies ever envisage having to perform his first ever staged production of Gluck’s seminal opera Orpheus and Eurydice engaging so physically with a fully-functioning circus troupe? That’s the challenge facing him in this week’s unconventional Gluck production, unveiled with its original cast in Brisbane in 2019, now restaged for a European premiere at Edinburgh Playhouse that draws together the original combined resources of Circa and Opera Queensland with Opera Australia, the Scottish Chamber Orchestra and Scottish Opera Chorus, conducted by period music specialist Laurence Cummings.
When we spoke, Davies’s only inkling of the task in hand was via a video of an earlier Australian performance. “I saw immediately how amazing Circa are. You can hear the audience gasp right at the beginning as they do this tumbling thing from a great height. What’s amazing is that their acrobatics are as fluid as dancing. The hardest thing that I have to do physically comes late in the show, when I stand on someone’s shoulders, surrounded by three or four people who are anchoring my ankles. I can tell from the performer on the video – whom I know, and who’s very athletic – that it’s a scary moment.”
Davies has since come to realise that, for his part, the physically of his role comes mostly in a more concentrated, more conducive form. “Yes, I have to carry quite a lot of the drama in my body, but a lot of that can be done standing still,” he explains. “Until I meet Eurydice in the underworld it’s just me and the chorus, but not in dialogue. Under such prolonged spotlight you have to find ways to project energy through stillness, which in itself is such a high-pressured thing because its very easy to slip unintentionally into concert mode.
“This is such a psychological piece – really, it’s about what’s going on in Orpheus’s head – which is what Yaron is particularly trying to demonstrate in his production,” Davies says. “I asked him why he has conflated the two female roles of Eurydice and Amore, played by the same singer [Australian soprano Samatha Clarke], and the answer I got was that Orpheus has murdered Eurydice and wakes up in this fractured state, maybe in a prison, maybe an asylum.”
This, Davies reckons, is where the “unworldliness” of the countertenor voice can really work its magic, closer in character to the castrato that Gluck originally intended than later tendencies to cast a female mezzo soprano in the role. Think Janet Baker, for whom this became a signature role.
“There is something disembodied about the countertenor that is close to the castrato in terms of pitch, and of course we’re seeing a man play the hero,” Davies explains. “But equally it stretches the countertenor’s capabilities beyond that of the choral world, presented with a meaty chunk of singing, on stage for an hour and a quarter. It feels very different from singing even a Handel role where you’re one of five or six characters. You’re on stage all night; that challenges you to be interesting with your voice. You can’t rely on just ethereal beauty. There has to be pain, anger, melancholy, all range of emotions. That is what Gluck is asking. That’s the challenge to me.”
Whatever the physical demands placed on him, Davies is readying himself. “I’m generally very conscious of trying to stay healthy and fit at the moment anyway,” he says. Besides addressing “the odd creak on the knee or shoulder”, that means looking good too. “I’m playing David in [Handel’s] Saul at Glyndebourne at the moment. At the beginning I’ve just defeated Goliath and the whole show opens with me covered in blood, half-naked with a sling and a shot. I’ve been going to the gym three times a week, and trying not to enjoy myself too much. It’s a real pain, but in the long run it’s good to keep on top of these things.”
As for his relationship with Gluck’s most famous opera, it is dominating his working life at the moment. Davies previously sang the Orpheus role In a 2018 Edinburgh Festival concert performance with The English Consort, later recording it with La Nuovo Musica for Pentatone. “I was originally booked to debut in this current production with Circa in Melbourne in November/December, but that was before the Edinburgh dates came up; and now, between those, in September/October I’ll be performing in a Robert Carsen production with Canadian Opera in Toronto. It’s full on up to Christmas, but I doubt I’ll be sick of it.”
Nor can he get too much of the Edinburgh Festival. “I love coming to Edinburgh. It’s the most worthwhile place to sing in Britain, a great set-up and great audiences. They let me do things I want to do.” Including, perhaps, his new circus repertoire?
Gluck’s Orpheus and Eurydice is at the Edinburgh Playhouse on 13, 15 & 16 August. Full information at www.eif.co.uk
